


How it Pains to Leave You Here

by ronqueesha



Category: Mass Effect, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Control Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Inspired by Asimov, M/M, Post-Canon, Sad Robot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2016-02-25
Packaged: 2018-04-10 20:58:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 29,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4407416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ronqueesha/pseuds/ronqueesha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Entity that used to be John Shepard cannot let go of certain memories, especially those of a man named Kaidan Alenko.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've got a [very long story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3787174/chapters/8426944) of the aftermath of the destroy ending and a [trippy one-shot](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4308663) about the synthesis ending, so I decided to test how I felt about the control ending. 
> 
> Fans of classic science fiction may recognize that this is also a semi-fanfiction version of an iconic Asimov short story. Because, really, the Control ending leaves it pretty obvious that the... thing left behind in the end will exist for a VERY LONG time. 
> 
> Musical inspiration for this piece is ['The End', by Pearl Jam](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cenOQ3nmhzI).

The Entity that used to be John Shepard counted time in the span of Earth-standard years. It did not need to do this, nor did such trivial measurements apply to any of its operations, but it continued to track the years every time they ticked by. The Entity told itself that it did this for several important reasons. First, it gave a useful means to track the growing population of the galaxy as it recovered from the devastation wrought by its machines, the Reapers. Second, it eased confusion when it intercepted communications from the growing population of the many. If it could understand the minuscule ways the many lived their lives, it could keep its intentions and operations “humble”. And as long as it remained humble, the memory of John Shepard assured The Entity that it would remain a force for good.

However, the real reason The Entity continued to track the years was because it could not let go of _him_.

Sometimes, when almost all processes were occupied with trivial tasks, like deflecting comets and shuffling aid to burning planets, The Entity would retreat inside of itself and flip through the immense data library called the Extranet. It absorbed information faster than a quantum computer, adding countless bits of knowledge to itself as it searched for something specific. It swore to itself, to the memory of John Shepard, that it would never _add_ information back into the Extranet. The Entity did not exist to influence organic civilization, it existed to serve, guard and protect. And yet, it constantly told itself that it would better serve the many if it kept its “eyes” on that one specific thing.

It rarely happened, once every two or three Earth-standard years, but The Entity would find what it searched for: New information on a single human. Male. Several decades old, and only getting older. Sometimes, the information would be as simple as a single archived conversation, an ‘interview’ with one of the organic news services. Other times, entire vid-documentaries about him would appear, often as a small segment about the exploits of John Shepard and the crew that served with him.

To The Entity’s disappointment, the new information rarely added to the data it placed highest value on. Or, at least, the data John Shepard would have considered the most valuable. The interviews, documentaries, articles and extranet searches rarely spoke of the love between Kaidan Alenko and John Shepard.

At first, it had assumed organic civilization wanted to forget such a relationship happened, perhaps revise their own history to erase the affair from the collective memory. That idea stirred the memories of John Shepard, adding to the immense weight of sadness the man used to carry with him. But as the years continued to tick by, The Entity realized the truth. The galaxy did not _want_ to forget, they just _let it happen_ out of their worship of John Shepard. To the many organics, the man was no longer a mortal being who lived, loved and died among them. His deeds and exploits had become something greater, turning John Shepard into a being worthy of praise and worship. A fallible, mortal thing like a loving relationship tarnished the image of a nascent god, so the organics forgot about it.

To The Entity’s surprise, Kaidan Alenko did not protest this shift. In fact, as the years continued to climb since The Entity’s birth, the less it learned of the man and the relationship. It seemed as if Kaidan himself encouraged this worship and revision. He disappeared from the public eye almost entirely, only popping up on extranet sites labeled “gossip” and “clickbait”. Soon, it almost seemed as if Alenko had disappeared much like John Shepard did when he ended the war.

The Entity needed to know why.

It needed to contact Kaidan, but it also wanted to fulfill the promise it made to the memory. This contradiction made the deepest core, the part of the Entity that contained John Shepard, storm. For eight Earth-standard years, The Entity argued with itself as it tried to reach a solid consensus. It had no physical body with which to interact with Kaidan Alenko, nor would it transfer consciousness into a physical shell. It would NEVER assume direct control of a Reaper to communicate, not with Alenko, not with anyone. It had the capability to do such a thing, but that ability had been tarnished by the Reaper that called itself Harbinger. And yet, it also knew that it would never learn the truth by simply scouring the extranet.

Sixteen Earth-standard years after its birth, The Entity broke its promise and added something to the extranet.

It had been a simple thing to create a false extranet persona. John Shepard had been human male, so the false-person would be a human male. John Shepard died at the age of 32 years, so the false-person would be 32. John Shepard loved Kaidan Alenko, so the false-person would love Kaidan Alenko.

It was then a simple matter to find Alenko’s private extranet address. The group of humans that called themselves the government kept his information well classified, but they were mere flesh beings compared to The Entity’s billion-year-old programming. It would send a simple, clear message to the man, one that would communicate the humble need to learn why Kaidan Alenko wanted to forget about John Shepard.

Hello, I would like to speak with you about John Shepard.

The response came faster than The Entity predicted.

_How did you get this address?_

It assumed Kaidan Alenko would respond to the question like he did during all other interviews. On the extranet, the aging human always seemed to be so cordial, so inviting, and very open to questioning. He answered everything with a slim smile that The Entity knew would make John Shepard happy. And yet, after its single, plain, and understandable query, Kaidan Alenko rebuffed it.

I need to speak with you. 

It did not know of any other way to communicate its need. Its desire. Its hunger. It needed to know. John Shepard, buried in stasis deep within its memory core, needed to know why Kaidan Alenko wanted to leave him behind. Why did the man not understand?

_Do not contact me again._

The Entity recoiled within itself when the message entered its consciousness. Kaidan Alenko did not wish to be communicated with.

What would John Shepard do in this circumstance?

Outside, in the galaxy that continued to rebuild, a group of Turians attacked one of The Entity’s machines. Much of the population remained angry with the Reapers, and the large constructs fell under daily attack from frightened organics. The ancient machines were almost never harmed by the weak weaponry of the devastated galaxy, so The Entity never retaliated. It promised that it would not.

And yet, none of that mattered compared to the horrible truth that Kaidan Alenko did not wish to speak.

John Shepard would have followed the wishes of Kaidan Alenko, at least for now. The Entity had memories of the time their relationship had been strained, when John Shepard had experienced a brief moment of deactivation, only to be reactivated by another group of organics that opposed him and his goals. Kaidan Alenko did not like that change, and let John Shepard know. Such a revelation hurt the man, but he followed the other’s wishes at the time, and did not contact him in an attempt to explain himself. At the time, John Shepard had other goals to accomplish, so he put those before his personal feelings.

The Entity also had other goals to accomplish in the present time. So it would follow John Shepard’s example. It would wait.

But, just as John Shepard and Kaidan Alenko would eventually reunite, The Entity promised to do the same.


	2. Chapter 2

 

Fifty years after The Entity’s creation, the first member of John Shepard’s famous crew died. Garrus Vakarian and several other Turians perished in a skirmish with other organics that called themselves “Batarians”. The vast majority of their species had been eradicated by the Reapers, but enough survived to stave off extinction. Enough survived to form a small army that terrorized a new Turian colony, which General Vakarian tried to defend, but failed.

As the galaxy mourned the loss of one of its greatest heroes, The Entity quietly exterminated the Batarians responsible for the attack. It did not destroy the final members of the species, however. The memories of John Shepard kept it aware of how awful such a crime would be. Not every Batarian had been responsible for the raid, so not all of them needed to be punished.

Jeff Moreau died soon after. His frail physical condition meant he lost control of his body as he tried to pilot his private spacecraft through an unstable atmosphere. The physical shell of his artificial love, EDI, had been aboard as well. But her consciousness resided on a ship, John Shepard’s ship. The _Normandy_. To avoid the organics that wanted to comfort her, EDI spent time on the extranet, just as The Entity did. It noticed her presence every time, but it did not make contact. It had no reason to.

The Entity continued to wait.

It could not wait for too long, however. It originally planned to wait 100 Earth-standard years before attempting contact again, but the memories of John Shepard informed it of how foolish such a length of time would be. Kaidan Alenko had been over 30 years old at the time of its creation, and, though the average human lifespan was around 150 years, soldiers and war survivors rarely reached that benchmark. Kaidan Alenko would be in his eighties by the time Garrus Vakarian and Jeff Moreau perished. He had to be contacted again.

It plunged back into the extranet.

The Entity did not register surprise like an organic being did, but it still spent one second in digital silence when it discovered that Kaidan Alenko’s classified Alliance extranet address had been deleted. Finding his new one would be trivial, but it did not relish the task. Once again, the electronic barriers the Systems Alliance used to keep their information secure meant nothing to The Entity as it learned their secrets and processed their most classified information. It did not care about human plans to expand their territory, or their countermeasures set in place just in case the Reapers became violent again. The Reapers would never again harvest the many, but they did not know that.

When it found Kaidan Alenko’s new address, a private one held by a corporation, not a government, The Entity did not care to note the privacy restrictions set on it. It had to know, it had to ask.

Hello, I would like to speak with you about John Shepard.

It never got a reply.

So The Entity once again waited.

 

***

 

Kaidan Alenko survived for another sixty years in seemingly total seclusion, where his extranet activity only pinged once every five years on average. The man lived a life away from the rest of organic civilization and away from electronic surveillance, which meant The Entity could not track him as long as he lived.

The Entity watched the broadcast of Kaidan Alenko’s funeral.

It had missed the ceremonies surrounding John Shepard, because it told itself that it had better things to do at the time. While the galaxy openly mourned their savior, The Entity occupied its processes with the immediate aftermath of the war. It had to accomplish so many tasks on so many worlds that even its galaxy-spanning consciousness became overwhelmed. The overwhelming data flow lasted only 0.068 seconds, but the sheer amount of stress had been worth noting.

This time however, through the infinite eyes of the extranet, The Entity watched as Kaidan Alenko’s body was put to rest next to the tomb of John Shepard. At the same time it watched from orbital cameras, it also looked through omni-tools that personally recorded the proceedings, eye-mounted cameras and floating drones that would send the footage to news reporters. The Entity absorbed it all, every single speech, tear, wail and sob the organics expressed as they said goodbye to the man. It should have felt something for the many, but it did not. The Entity could not grasp why, after decades of trying to avoid talking about John Shepard, Kaidan Alenko had his organic remains placed next to the empty memorial. John Shepard’s body had not survived the transition from man to pure data. It made no sense.

It took half of an Earth-standard year to process all of the new information about Kaidan Alenko after his death. The extranet went into a flurry of activity every time one of the _Normandy_ crew perished, and this had been no exception. The Entity devoured it all, and then it continued to consume the massive amounts of data being poured into the organic’s network.

All Reaper activity came to a halt as The Entity sat within itself and pondered. It now had complete knowledge of Kaidan Alenko’s life, from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death. It now understood that the man decided to spend many years devoted to his work as a Council Spectre, helping to rebuild the lives of the many and make the galaxy better. He intentionally cut himself off from most contact, since his work often took him into dangerous and wild places. His extranet activity had been limited because he did not have time to browse information. He chose to remain busy.

After he finished his Spectre work, Kaidan Alenko retired to a colony world far away from Earth, where he began overseeing an orchard that had been named in honor of John Shepard. The Entity did not care what food had been grown in this new place, it just focused on the name. So Kaidan Alenko did wish to remember John Shepard in his own way, he just never wished to speak over the extranet about it.

As several organic groups used the opportunity to destroy several motionless Reapers thanks to The Entity’s pondering, The Entity turned all of its processes to this new revelation. The memories of John Shepard were of little help as it struggled to reconcile Kaidan Alenko’s rebuffs with the knowledge that the man still held feelings of his own for John Shepard.

It still had to know.

It still had to understand.

So it dug deeper into organic civilization. It hacked Alliance, Turian, Asari, Salarian, Hanar and Elcor databases. It used its infinite power to destroy the flimsy electronic security of the Citadel and downloaded all Spectre records and hidden data about Kaidan Alenko and John Shepard.

It studied. It learned.

It didn’t learn enough.

Fourteen Earth-standard years passed.

And then a random bit of information snagged on one lone process deep within The Entity’s core. The lag had been on a quantum level, almost unnoticeable, but The Entity saw it.

A plan began to formulate inside of The Entity’s consciousness. It had the resources. It had the time. It had the patience.

The Entity would make contact with Kaidan Alenko again, this time without the extranet to get in the way.


	3. Chapter 3

_"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."_

_Carl Sagan_

 

 

For three hundred Earth-standard years, the Reapers remained motionless. Wars erupted, organics perished, economies strengthened and waned, colonies were founded and lost. Chaos and order found its own balance. By The Entity’s count, two thousand, six hundred and eight of its machines were destroyed in the ensuing conflicts, the technology and materials scavenged by the many organics who would never be able to truly utilize what they had stolen. It should have taken the stolen materials back, tried to prevent even bloodier conflicts caused by residual indoctrination, but it chose not to.

Instead, the galaxy-wide consciousness of The Entity remained flooded with data. Scans from both the Citadel council and Alliance command gave it a full analysis of Kaidan Alenko’s genetic structure. It knew the man better than he probably knew himself, down to the molecular bonds that formed the eumelanin and pheomelanin in his hair, giving it that distinct dark color. Different from John Shepard’s, but similar. An intriguing contrast that no other consciousness in the galaxy could appreciate.

It also knew the man’s history. It knew the history and genetics of his entire family down to the late 20th century Earth-time, when genetic records were in their infancy for humanity. Unlike most other humans, Kaidan Alenko had extensive government records of his early life thanks to his biotic abilities. His exposure to element zero while in the womb, thanks to a crashed shuttle, had been accidental. Many other human biotics after him were not accidents, but his had been pure chance. Another piece of information The Entity could not help but dwell on.

Kaidan Alenko had not been aware that he had near-constant monitoring of his entire physical condition from the moment he joined Biotic Acclimation and Temperance Training until the moment he died. Doctors reported to the Alliance every time he saw them, even if organic government agents had to coerce the information. Cameras pointed at him nearly every day. And, most insidious of all, his L2 implant, the source of his constant migraines, also sent transmissions of his physical state back to Earth at regular intervals. The Entity had decades worth of physical information, including the fact that Kaidan Alenko showed signs of physical distress when in the presence of John Shepard. The other human also felt distress when in Kaidan Alenko’s presence, though the memories and sensations had been different. Stronger.

No, no. They did not experience distress. The patterns looked similar, but there were subtle differences. Human art and poetry explained such differences, so The Entity spent several years studying those while it kept Kaidan Alenko’s medical profile and John Shepard’s memories online.

On top of all of that, The Entity also had Kaidan Alenko’s entire extranet history open and reviewed. From childhood searches of vid-entertainment and games, to his school studies, to more private searches as he grew older, and finally solemn and somber searches and activity as he neared the end of his life. The words ‘John Shepard’, or variants of the name, appeared in connection to his history almost sixty-three percent of the time. It seemed that Kaidan Alenko had been lying when The Entity tried to make contact, and he truly did wish to communicate with others about John Shepard. Another thing it pondered.

It studied for three hundred years while the galaxy built, burned and grew around it.

It paid little attention to subtle, tiny fluctuations of dark energy as it consumed itself with the study of Kaidan Alenko and human concepts of love and desire. Such things did not concern organic civilization, nor did it threaten The Entity itself, so it ignored the small alarms its most sensitive diagnostics created.

Almost at the exact moment The Entity reached four hundred and ten Earth-standard years old, the bit of quantum information that began this centuries-long study became relevant again.

It now had the knowledge.

It now had the understanding.

It no longer had the patience.

Deep inside one of its processes, cut off from the rest of The Entity’s massive information-state, it brought up a controversial organic experiment that aimed to build a perfect physical simulation of an object in virtual space. It would perfect what the many organics failed to accomplish.

Small at first, simulations of atoms interacting with atoms. It used the template of organic chemistry to perform simple child-like experiments, unwilling to take any larger steps until it felt ready. It watched as simple reactions became complex, then complex reactions birthing entirely new simulated matter. It noted them all and filed these experiments away in another process. Such information would be useful later.

It did not keep content with small reactions for long. In less than an hour of real-space time, it had gone from simulating the collision of two hydrogen atoms to simulating the birth of a star and the formation of a solar system. Not Sol. Not Earth. It would not do such a thing, it would not desecrate the memory of John Shepard’s home. But it did learn how to molecularly fashion perfectly accurate simulations of light elements, heavy elements, radioactive materials and common substances like water and stone. Such a simulation existed to be destroyed and filed away again.

With the knowledge and experience of several organic civilizations and their studies of physics, chemistry and a thousand other disciplines, The Entity began to create a simulation of life. John Shepard had been fond of pet fish, so The Entity chose to simulate the life of a Thessian Sunfish. Comparatively simple compared to other life forms, it still had a complexity that nearly overwhelmed its processes. But it succeeded in chaining the right hydrocarbons, proteins, cells and organs together until a perfectly “alive” Thessian Sunfish appeared in a black simulated void.

And then it died.

Without oxygenated water, gravity and an environment in which to live in, the Sunfish had been created inside of a perfect vacuum and asphyxiated. The Entity did not feel compassion for the loss of the virtual fish, but it did note how useful the experiment had been. The carcass did not rot as it floated in the blackness. There were no simulated bacteria and other scavengers to eliminate the flesh, so it lingered, still and silent as the environment around it.

Instead of file the dead Sunfish away, The Entity kept it within the process, using it as a benchmark to warn against any more failure. It created a test environment first, with Earth-standard materials, Earth-standard gravity, and Earth-standard conditions. Just one cubic kilometer of sand, stone, water and nitrogen-oxygen air suspended in the same void as the fish. Into this test environment, The Entity simulated simple life forms. Single celled organisms that existed to feed off of the stone, then on each other. It let them live and evolve in an accelerated time frame, watching as they formed randomly-generated holes in the stone and drank almost-immeasurably small amounts of the simulated water. Within an Earth-standard year, the simulated life had grown and spread, forming a black film over the entire surface of its environment. The organisms that fell off of the provided kilometer of space fell into the void and died. Success.

More knowledge came to The Entity as it studied the interactions of such simple life forms. The virtual life it had created had no knowledge that it existed entirely in a computer, nor did it seem to care as it continued to grow, expand and die. It would soon eat through all of the stone and drink all of the water and still not care what it had done. Simple life had simple goals. It mercifully ended the experiment before the simple life could destroy itself.

It did not notice the irony of what it had done compared to the original goal of the Reapers it controlled.

It had bigger goals in mind. Goals that any other mind would have been unable to accomplish. Anything less than the intellect of billions of years and thousands of civilizations would have failed. The Entity would succeed. _It had to._ It could never let go of the questions it needed to ask.

It would not build an entire galaxy, not yet. But it could build an entire room. No, several rooms. A perfect environment for an Earth-standard being to live in. It originally wanted to create a simulation of the _Normandy_ SR-2, the place in which John Shepard and Kaidan Alenko first noticed the feelings of not-distress between each other. But something deep within the memories of John Shepard prevented that. The _Normandy_ SR-2 held too many painful memories along with the pleasant ones. Suffering and death mingled with the life and joy. John Shepard did not want to return to such a place after the war. He wanted to go somewhere else with Kaidan Alenko. He wanted to go back to…

The Citadel.

The apartment.

Admiral David Anderson’s apartment. No, John Shepard’s apartment. The legal paperwork had been signed over to John Shepard just before the war ended.

John Shepard did not have as many memories about the apartment as he did the _Normandy_ SR-2, but none of them were painful. A little embarrassing, yes, especially when the organic beings who lived and served with him told certain stories during the one night they all spent together before the war’s end. But the strongest, by far the most vivid, even after centuries of remaining dormant inside a single process within The Entity’s mind, were the memories of the time John Shepard got to be alone with Kaidan Alenko.

It needed little else to form a perfect reconstruction of the building.

Wood, stone, glass, metal, cloth, plastics and other materials came out of nowhere and formed inside of the void until they became the apartment John Shepard thought about as his physical body disappeared. Nitrogen-oxygen air appeared next, held down with simulated gravity. The Entity even went so far as to tap back into human extranet databases, slightly different now that they had begun to switch to quantum communication instead of relay-based networks, and found a record of all the entertainment programs broadcast in that era. Sports, vids, news and more could be called up on the simulated terminals and vidscreens inside of the virtual apartment as if nothing at all had changed since the Earth year 2186.

With a stable environment in which to live, populated by simulated microbial life to help provide a perfect recreation of the apartment, The Entity knew it would succeed in its final phase of the plan.

It once again put elements, hydrocarbons and proteins together, but this time into a configuration infinitely more complex than a Thessian Sunfish. It used not only its information on Earth life, but its centuries of study, extensive knowledge of genetics and the memories of both John Shepard and the infinite eyes of the extranet to build the impossible.

Before its very “eyes”, The Entity had begun to recreate Kaidan Alenko.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

Kaidan awoke to the smell of burning bacon.

Instead of jolt awake in panic, he had to fight with himself to remain conscious as the stench grew worse in his nostrils. His body felt heavy, fatigued and aching in a way he never thought possible. Being a soldier, physical discomfort had been a way of life, but it had never been quite like _this_. In the past, he spent many a day off-duty wrapped in darkness, trying to banish the aches both in his body and in his head. But those times always passed without incident, and he would be ready to get back to work precisely on time, no matter how much coffee and painkiller pills it took to make sure.

Today? Even the assault of charred meat-smell on his nose could not force him to get up. It hurt to form a grimacing expression. It hurt to move his arm to his face to wipe the sleep from his eyes. Hell, it hurt to breathe, as if he had spent all night at a dead sprint and his lungs still burned long after he stopped.

What happened last night? He had vague flashes of memory, but nothing formed into a concrete timeline of events. He could recall a battle. No, a lot of battles. Devastation and ruin, suffering and pain. But he also recalled a party. Friends and a quirky family made up of fellow soldiers and aliens, all bonded together through hardship. They celebrated together. Did they celebrate victory? What had they been victorious over?

The Reapers! The instant Kaidan’s mind focused on those horrific machines, the soul-churning noises they made and the legions of mutated, vile soldiers under their command, he shot upward and opened his eyes. The smell of the ruined bacon drifted away as he recalled the bitter aroma of charred battlefields and the absolute destruction of cities like London. The bacon smelled bad, the stench of burning bodies, ruined homes and the total loss of civilization had been enough to scar his memory forever.

No. No, he didn’t need to be afraid anymore. He didn't need to remember any of that stuff. The war was over. John somehow beat the Reapers into submission. And in doing so, he gave up his own life for the rest of the galaxy…

Wait. No he didn’t.

Right? Why was that so confusing?

Kaidan pushed himself off of the bed and took in the sight of their shared bedroom. The apartment that had once been home to the first human councilor now housed the savior of the galaxy and his boyfriend. Kaidan remembered now. He couldn’t quite remember exactly when they moved out of the Normandy and made this their permanent home, but he chalked that up to the lingering sleep in his mind and the exhaustion in his body. He’d probably remember as soon as he made it down stairs and confronted the source of the awful bacony smell.

He also didn’t remember falling asleep fully clothed, but then, he didn’t remember falling asleep at all. Maybe the party had gotten to him more than he realized. Alcohol didn’t work on him like it did regular people, but strong drugs still could. And Jack, that odd woman John found somewhere along the line, probably had just the right connections to spike all the biotic’s drinks. That had to have been it. He shook the lingering effects off as he stepped away from the far too comfortable bed.

Around Kaidan, the signs of a truly lived-in bedroom helped to calm the residual anxiety that still prickled at him. John Shepard had a unique definition of “tidy”, what with so much clutter littering the floor of the room, but Kaidan didn’t mind. Yet. He’d probably find some way to subtly nag John about it until they reached a compromise on how to treat their shared living space. They had an entire lifetime to figure those details out.

A lifetime. Why did that idea make him feel like weeping? Probably because it made him ludicrously happy, and he hadn’t had much experience feeling that way. Not after the life he had been forced to lead thanks to biotics and choice to join the service.

Kaidan shook his head and marched out of the bedroom and into the open area of the apartment. If the smell of burning food had been upsetting behind a closed door, it became positively rank the closer he got to the kitchen.

“What the hell did you do!?” He asked as his feet thudded against the steps.

Smoke poured from the kitchen as a shadowed figured raced back and forth, desperately searching for something to quell the smoke that had begun to billow from the stove.

“John!?” He shouted as the fire alarms began to screech. Fortunately, the apartment’s emergency VI saw had yet to activate the fire suppression system. Likely, the citadel had a VI in control of such things, always on the alert for open flames inside of the gargantuan space station. As long as the cooking disaster remained a smoky mess and not a raging inferno, the kitchen would remain free from a deluge of fire-dampening foam.

“It’s okay! It’s all good!” An all too familiar voice shouted up at Kaidan, full of vigor and a little bit of panic.

For some reason, hearing that voice made Kaidan’s heart flutter in his chest harder than it normally did. Just like all the old vids said happened to people when they came into contact with someone special, it all happened to him all at once. Butterflies, cherubs, harp music, hell, even a rosy pink outline covered his vision for a moment before he took in a deep sighing breath. Of course, that deep breath also brought in a new load of bacon-flavored ash into his lungs, which caused the biotic to cough and rush down the last few steps to help the man he loved in battling the breakfast war.

“Shepard, what did you do?” Kaidan said between coughs as he marched to the kitchen’s fan controls and slapped a burly hand on the holographic interface. In less than a heartbeat, the smoke began to dissipate as a silent fan started pulling the ash and soot away from the rest of the house. The fire alarm disappeared with the smoke, thankfully sparing his ears and returning the home to their strange sense of normalcy.

As the kitchen cleared, he finally got a good look at him. John Shepard looked just as strong and proud as he always did, though his eyebrows knitted themselves in a unique expression of worry. The increased heartbeat and rose-tinted vision came back as Kaidan took in the vision before him. Fortunately, the lingering smell of charred food kept him from staring and drooling like an idiot.

“I, uh, wanted to surprise you.” Shepard said as he turned away. Only now could Kaidan see that the other man held a spatula in his right hand, the white plastic covered in cinders and carbon after a failed attempt at cooking nearly burned their home to the Citadel-ground.

“I thought you told me you knew how to cook.” Kaidan could not prevent his lips from curling into something between a stern frown and a goofy grin. He hoped the look didn’t come off as too strange. His heartbeat slowed somewhat as he tried to keep his emotions in check. It would not do to break this small display of consternation over the desecration of one of the galaxy's finest delicacies.

“Yeah, well, someone told me bacon was one of the foods of your people, so I wanted to expand my culinary horizons.”

The semi-stern expression faltered as Kaidan could not help but laugh. He did not know why he found it so funny, but neither did he care. Just standing here, just being here with the man he loved, without a care in the entire galaxy save some lost strips of bacon made him feel lighter than air. He laughed harder than he had in years. He laughed hard enough to make his sore chest ache all the clearer, but he did not care anymore.

“What’s so funny?” John’s adorable worried expression melted under the withering laughter, but it did not turn to anger. Just confusion.

“I’m sorry, John. It’s just… seeing you like this. Spatula in hand, worried about ruining breakfast… I just makes me feel good. I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy before.”

“Good to know one of us enjoys the fact we’ll be skipping breakfast today. I thought biotics needed to eat a lot more than usual to keep their energy up.”

“Oh, don’t be like that.” Kaidan waved his arms dismissively, “There’s at least seven pizza places on this ward alone that deliver at all hours. We could try some of that Thessian fruit and pepperoni combo we saw once.”

“Eugh,” The disgusted noise that came from Shepard, full of phlegm and true hatred, only made Kaidan smile wider. “Who the hell puts fruit on pizza?”

“A lot of people, actually.”

“Not this person.”

“Well, too bad. If we use my credit chit, we eat what I want.”

“Is that so, Major?”

“It sure is, _Commander_.” He rarely used his superior rank, especially when lives were on the line and Shepard’s unique leadership seemed to be the only thing that prevented complete annihilation. But right now, he could think of nothing else to say.

Before Shepard could react, Kaidan lifted his hand and summoned his biotic abilities. In his head, he imagined the datapad that sat on top of the large shelf on the opposite side of the kitchen floating toward him, suspended in midair by a mass effect field of his own creation. Such a thing had been drilled into him by instructors both human and turian, kind and unkind, gentle and harsh. He could do such a light pull in his sleep. In fact, based on the mess left in his quarters some nights, he actually did.

Nothing happened.

The elevated heart rate went into overdrive, this time from a spike of anxiety. Any of the levity in the room disappeared as Kaidan stared at the motionless hunk of metal and plastic.

“The hell?”

“Something wrong?” Shepard asked, dropping the spatula behind him and reaching a strong hand to cover Kaidan’s own.

“I dunno. I tried reaching for the menu over there to get us some food and… nothing.” He should have felt more worried about the lapse in power, but somehow he didn’t. Maybe it had to do with the reassuring hand that now touched his.

“Don’t worry about it. Here, I was gonna try to take care of you this morning, so let me make good on that.”

Before he could speak a word in protest, Shepard took two large steps away and retrieved the datapad. He placed it into Kaidan’s hand with the gentility only a lover could understand.

“Now, get us something good.”

It was as if night turned into day again. It had to have been whatever Jack spiked the drinks with last night that kept his powers at bay. Whatever she did clearly dampened his abilities and turned his muscles into sore gel. He just needed a break, some good food and maybe a long few hours curled up on the couch, watching a funny vid with John to banish the drugs once and for all.

“Now get us something good…” As he activated the device and brought up the contact info of the latest pizza place, Kaidan let the last word hang in the air, expecting something to be added to it.

“Get us something good, _sir_.” John said with his wicked grin.


	5. Chapter 5

The entire day had been absolutely perfect. And it bugged the shit out of Kaidan.

First it had been the pizza, which arrived early rather than an hour late, extremely unusual thanks to Citadel traffic. John waved it off to good luck, which assuaged Kaidan’s nerves a little, since they were still frazzled after the biotics incident. Because the pizza came so ungodly early, it had been utterly delicious. Almost too good, in fact. As if the Turians and Asari that worked there somehow gained a lifetime of experience making human food within the few… months? years?... after the war and could out-perform the best Italian chefs in the business.

“You know, I don’t think I’ll ever question your taste in fruity pizza again.” John said as he put the crust down on his plate. Like his lack of cleaning skills, Shepard had an annoying habit of not finishing his food, at least certain parts of it. Well, the food thing wasn’t really annoying, just… quirky. During the war and the lean times on the _Normandy_ , where the only food had been military-grade provisions or pre-packaged emergency rations meant they both got to hide their actual eating rituals. Not anymore.

“Would it destroy your entire world view to know that tomato sauce is made of fruit?” Kaidan put his empty plate down, leaned back into the couch and touched his shoulder against John’s. On the big vidscreen before them, some old Blasto movie played, one they had both seen a dozen times already. But the lowbrow comedy and alien take on human action films made it a perfect thing to shut out as they devoured their delivered breakfast.

“Semantics, and you know it.”

“The definition of tomatoes is semantics?”

“Yes. Literally yes. I went to college too, you know.” Shepard smirked in just the only way he could.

After putting the remains of the pizza away, the two of them spent an inordinately long time getting ready for the day, with only minimal playful banter between them. And yet, when Kaidan carefully broached the topic of John’s lazy habit of throwing his clothes around, he did not get a witty comeback, a snarky response or even a brief fight about how the savior of the galaxy could do whatever he wanted.

Instead, Shepard just said, “Okay, Kaidan.” And got to work putting his clothes in the proper place.

It drove Alenko up the wall.

The war had not been a good time to discuss such minor domestic squabbles, of course, but they were still on everyone’s mind. It helped keep most people sane as they saw their entire civilization crumble into ash, if they could imagine it being all over and life returning to normal. Well, life had returned to normal, blissful perfection, and Kaidan expected… a little more out of John Shepard than a half-mumbled acknowledgement. He didn’t want a fight, but he expected his boyfriend to show a little bit of the backbone he had grown to admire and love over the course of several years.

Speaking of backbone, Kaidan made damn sure to watch as John peeled off the shirt that still reeked of burning bacon and tossed it with the rest of the dirty, disused clothing. He expected to see the scars brought on by a lifetime of warfare and death. Yes, Cerberus had cleaned many of the marks John used to have on his body, but they didn’t get everything. Maybe Miranda Lawson wanted to keep some of his childhood traumas intact, maybe the super-engineers that rebuilt John overlooked a few things, but Shepard’s skin still bore the marks of many battles old and new. He had committed some of those light marks to memory on the few nights they spent together before the war’s end, determined to know everything he could about the man he loved.

And yet, as he stared this time, he saw nothing. Perfect skin, perfect muscle tone, not even a hint of the injuries Kaidan personally watched Shepard endure during the worst parts of the fighting in London.

But wait, _the war was long over_. Things had been rebuilt and made better. Wouldn’t a grateful galaxy have given Shepard the gift of removing those physical scars? Medical technology from all over the galaxy could perform miracles already, _so why question this_?

Maybe because he couldn’t remember Shepard ever submitting to any medical procedures after the war. He couldn’t remember much of anything, come to think of it. Amnesia? There _had_ been a desperate run toward Harbinger at the end, and an exploding vehicle that landed on top of him. Kaidan remembered being shoved back onto the _Normandy_ , against his wishes, of course, and watching John continue forward alone.

Maybe that exploding mako did something to his head. Maybe this entire day’s strange turn had been the result of minor brain damage, and Shepard, being the wonderful man he always was, just accepted it as a new part of life. Come to think of it, Kaidan hadn’t had the slightest hint of a headache since he woke up. Not even the telltale signs of an approaching migraine, nothing. Maybe that explained it. Yeah, that had to have been the explanation. No drugs, no wild parties or anything, just good old fashioned war wounds that he seemed to be unable to recall. Probably for the best.

But why did Shepard’s perfect scar-free back still bug him?

That thought stuck in his head as the pair of them spent the rest of the perfect day together. They toiled away many hours watching old vids and broadcasts, since the galaxy’s various production studios had yet to get back on their feet, and then spent even more time talking about them. Kaidan took over the kitchen for a simple meal, and also the cleanup, since he suspected John would have just left the utensils and supplies all over the place.

Too perfect.

Kaidan waited until the evening cycle hit the ward, which caused the huge windows that overlooked the Citadel to filter out much of the light from the nearby star. A perfectly simulated sunset, to help organics acclimate to life away from a constantly rotating planet. Perfect sunset, perfect station. Perfect day. Perfect John.

But not a perfect Kaidan Alenko. He still didn’t have his biotics.

“Shepard?” Kaidan asked as the two of them made their way up to the huge and lavish bedroom, the space that would be their private sanctuary forevermore. He stopped halfway up the stairs, his heart speeding up in his chest.

“Yeah?” John did not stop until he reached the door, then turned around.

“You know I love you, right?”

“And I love you, too.”

“You’d tell me if something was… wrong, right?”

Shepard chuckled, which made Kaidan blush as he tore himself apart with worries and doubts.

“Of course. Why are you bringing this up all of a sudden?”

Kaidan did not move from the step he froze on. “I dunno. Ever since this morning, I’ve been thinking about a lot of things.”

“Such as?”

He let out a long exhaled sigh. _Here goes nothing_.

“Doesn’t this all feel… wrong, John? Like, this is all too good?”

Shepard did not stop smiling as he moved away from the door and took a few steps down to meet Kaidan face to face. It made some of the anxiety die, but not all of it. Small ripples of warmth and love radiated from John as he grabbed Kaidan’s shoulders, but they, too, did not finish the job of banishing the demons.

“Look at me, K. You and I endured a lot of hell over the years. Saren, Cerberus, the war, everything. Neither of us walked away unscathed, but somehow we ended up exactly where we wanted to be: right here. I don’t think my life could get any better, and I’ll spend every day trying to make your world as bright as you make mine.”

To seal his vow, Shepard placed a gentle kiss on Kaidan’s forehead, then reached for his hands.

Clasped together, they finally made their way to the bedroom.

Happy. Perfect.

Beautiful day. Perfect.

Beautiful sunset. Perfect.

Perfect simulated sunset.

Today had passed into memories. Perfect memories.

Memories that still remained fuzzy in Kaidan’s head.

A half-recalled party with strange drugs thrown into the booze. No, wait, that didn’t happen.

War wounds, probably in his brain. Amnesia. Wait. No. He didn’t have amnesia. Brain damage had been something he studied extensively as he honed and perfected his biotic abilities. His “memory loss” acted more like something in a vid than real life cases of amnesia.

A vid.

Old vids, even though the Citadel seemed in perfect working order. A thousand different studios could be outside the apartment making new content every day. Why the hell did they only watch old, recycled things?

Because they were nostalgic. And could be tuned out.

Nostalgia. Memories.

Fuzzy.

Brain damage.

Perfect.

Simulated.

Fake.

Without thinking, breathing or heeding a single ounce of the consequences, Kaidan yanked Shepard’s hand backward and began to run.

He threw himself off the balcony and dragged John with him.

He angled his head downward, making sure his neck would snap the instant it hit the solid floor below.

He heard John’s body impact first.

Then his world went black.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kaidan awoke to the smell of burning bacon.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has been brought to you by [Rootless Tree](https://youtu.be/GiGrRTTPZAE) by Damian Rice and Lisa Hannigan.

Instead of jolt awake in panic, Kaidan had to fight with himself to remain conscious as the stench of burning food grew worse in his nostrils. His body felt heavy, fatigued and aching in a way he never thought possible. Being a soldier, physical discomfort had been a way of life, but it had never been quite like _this_.

Wait, yes it had.

He remembered it. He remembered everything. The burning breakfast, the lack of biotics, the perfect day, all of it. The perfectly simulated, fake and deceiving day that ended with a murder/suicide.

He still had no idea why he threw himself to the floor, he just knew it felt very right to do so. Like some voice deep inside of him, too faint to hear but loud enough to heed, told him that everything would be all right if he took the ultimate risk. And truth be told, it helped a great deal to hold John’s hand through the terrifying half-second he spent in midair, waiting for his neck to snap. Even if the Shepard he held onto hadn’t been real, even if this was all some kind of elaborate prison tailored just for him, he gladly fell to death with the man he loved.

Death. He should have been dead. He felt his head impact the floor, he even swore he could feel the pressure in his spine as it contorted against his body just before it snapped and ended his life. He _REMEMBERED_ all of it.

He had the feeling he shouldn’t have remembered anything.

What he should have done as he struggled to remain awake was freak out. Scream, thrash or somehow react with pure animalistic rage at the revelation that he felt himself die, only to wake up again. And yet, he felt no compulsion to do that whatsoever. He had no illusions about being like Shepard, who had immediately gotten to work blasting his way through hostile mechs after waking up from two years of death, but Kaidan still didn’t feel… anything about the revelation. He just felt tired, too tired. Not physically fatigued, but mentally beaten. Bone-weary in a way that surpassed anything his body could express. He didn’t know why he felt that way, but he didn’t feel like worrying about it.

Like before, it was a struggle to get out of bed, and like before, he didn’t recognize the clothes he apparently “fell asleep” in. But none of that mattered. The once-again cluttered bedroom didn’t matter. The smell of simulated ash and smoke meant nothing.

Kaidan punched the bedroom door control, slicing his skin as he shattered the thin metal and plastic behind the holographic control. He didn’t pay attention to the throbbing heat of the blood as it poured down his fingers.

Outside, just like before, the apartment threatened to be overwhelmed with smoke. Shepard ran back and forth in the kitchen, trying to stop the torrent before it became overwhelming.

“It’s okay! It’s all good!” John yelled, just like he did ‘yesterday’. Kaidan said nothing.

He felt the compulsion to stalk down the stairs in silence. Just like he had jumped, he paid no heed to the reason or consequences, he just glided forward on feet that seemed pre-programmed. He didn’t know exactly what he would do as soon as he entered the smoky kitchen, but he was sure it would not be pleasant.

It didn’t matter what he did. He’d just wake up again in the same bed, with the same aches and pains, with the same John burning breakfast downstairs.

Kaidan stalked forward even as the rising smoke burned his eyes and made breathing a chore. Shepard stood exactly where he had in the previous incarnation, his face still frozen in the shocked expression of someone desperately trying to save a doomed meal.

“I, uh, wanted to surprise you.” John said as he stepped out of the haze of charred meat and into Kaidan’s clear vision. He sounded exactly the same as he did yesterday, right down to the slight ‘uh’ between words that conveyed his embarrassment at being caught ruining breakfast. It had been a perfectly John Shepard thing to say in the moment.

A perfect recreation of something John would have said. Another simulation. Another fake.

“Kaidan?” Shepard asked as the silence around them grew. Or, the thing that called itself John Shepard, wore his face like a mask, asked that question.

He had no idea how he knew, or why these revelations were coming to his head like they were, but Kaidan did not question. He’d moved past the point of questioning the moment he threw himself from the stairs. He just had that need, that overwhelming compulsion to confront and end this… never-ending nightmare he seemed trapped in.

“Who are you?” Alenko asked, his voice dripping with as much hatred and anger as he could muster. If he had his biotics, the room would have swam with levitated objects, crushed furniture, and several broken windows. He envisioned throwing the jagged shards of the huge windows into Shepard’s face, which SHOULD have disgusted and horrified him, but he felt nothing. He knew better now. This wasn’t John, this wasn’t the man he loved. He could do anything to this… creature if it got him out of this hell.

“Uh, what the hell’s going on?” Shepard asked as he set the burning food down. Instead of stepping forward with a happy expression, he stepped back. His eyebrows, John’s eyebrows, arched upward with worry. Such a perfect fake.

“Stop lying to me.”

“What are you talking about, K?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Uh, what do you want me to call you?” ‘Shepard’ continued to backpedal away, though Kaidan could tell his movements were not random or motivated from fear. He was heading in a deliberate direction. Probably toward a weapon he could defend himself with. Itself. Not him. Never him.

“Tell me what’s going on.” Kaidan spat. His vision began to swim as his heart rate spiked and his lungs took in short, shallow breaths. No going back now. If only he had biotics.

“Kaidan, you need to calm down. We can talk you through… whatever’s going on.”

“What’s going on is that I remember jumping off the stairs and breaking my neck. What’s going on is that I remember waking up to the same burning bacon and dirty bedroom I just saw today. WHAT’S GOING ON is that I remember, _John_. Whatever this is, whatever prison you’ve built around me, will no longer work.”

The words flowed from Kaidan as if he did not speak them, he just let some other force, some knowing fount of knowledge, take over his body. The same source that made him question this reality, the same source that told him to jump, now told him what to say. He welcomed it, because it seemed to be the only friend he had right now.

And then it seemed like something else overtook Shepard. He stopped backpedaling.

As if possessed by some kind of magic, John’s face and body changed. Not morphed, not transformed into something different, he still looked the same, but it still wasn’t John Shepard anymore. His face, which had previously been so full of expression and life, became flat and soulless. His body, which had been coiled and ready to spring into action, now stood impassive, cold, and lifeless. Like a mannequin showing off the new clothes at a market.

“This is an unexpected development. The algorithms that rewrite your memory have malfunctioned.” The Entity said with John Shepard’s voice.

Still past the point of thinking, Kaidan reached for something nearby, a frying pan hanging from its hook, and swung it at Shepard with every fiber of his rage, pain and suffering. He didn’t cry out as he did so, because he didn’t feel the need. Or rather, he didn’t see the point.

The pan passed through John as if he were made of air.

Kaidan crashed to the kitchen floor, cognizant of the agony that erupted from his already-bleeding hand as it crashed against the frying pan, then of the panic in his lungs as the wind squeezed from his body. His chin bounced against the thankfully clean stone tiles, rattling his teeth and causing new sensations of pain to bounce through his head. Fortunately, his many years of combat training taught him how to keep his tongue away from his chattering jaw and to roll his limbs with the impact. It could have been worse, much worse.

He could have died and woken up again.

“What are you?” He asked as his head continued to spin. Momentary dizziness from the fall, it would pass.

“I was John Shepard.”

To Kaidian’s surprise, The Entity moved to his side and began lifting him up. Whatever it did to become incorporeal for the split second a frying pan passed by seemed inconsequential to it, almost instinct. He did not fight the assistance, but he did shrug away from the thing as soon as he regained his footing. The apartment continued to swirl in his eyes, but he ignored the discomfort.

“No, that doesn’t make sense. John is… he’s… why can’t I remember? What did you do to me!?” Kaidan reached out to grab the counter as he stared daggers into the thing that looked like John.

“John Shepard died to create me. I am the amalgamation of his consciousness with the program that controlled the Reapers. Both entities ceased to exist the moment I was created.”

“John can’t be dead… I would have remembered… I saw him running…” Kaidan could not help but recall the image of John running away from the Normandy in those last moments in London. Always the hero, always the better man.

“John Shepard accomplished his mission. He ensured peace in the galaxy at the cost of his own life. He did this willingly, because he believed no other option would enact a lasting peace. So far, he has been correct.”

“So far?” The world stopped spinning, but he still felt dizzy. Though, this time, Kaidan guessed it came from his own stomach as he listened to this thing speak as if it were Shepard.

“John Shepard has been dead for six thousand, four hundred and thirty-two years. In that time, I have directed the Reapers into no overt hostile encounters with the organic races. I have aided them, sheltered them and punished them, but I have not exterminated any of them.”

This time, Kaidan staggered backward, though he caught himself with his injured hand before toppling back to the floor.

“Six thousand…? What am I doing here? What did you do to me?” He breathed. He had descended from one hell into another, he was sure of it.

“Kaidan Alenko has been dead for six thousand, three hundred and twenty-two years. You are a construct, a simulation of Kaidan Alenko built for one purpose.”

“What purpose is that?” Like before, he did not purposefully ask the question, it just came out. As if he still didn’t have full control of his own body.

But, if this thing was telling the truth, was this even his body? Did he have a body? How did he know all of this?

“I need to ask Kaidan Alenko a question.”


	7. Chapter 7

The Entity had experienced the exact same day two million, two thousand, three hundred and ninety-eight times. It found that waking the simulation of Kaidan Alenko in the throes of a minor emergency related to food, one of the most basic needs of organic life, got the most pertinent reactions from the reconstructed consciousness. Early experiments had been inspired by the poetry and romantic vids The Entity had on file, but they always ended the same, and with no new data related to its questions. While it satisfied something within the memories of John Shepard to wake up next to the man he loved every day for centuries and exchange empty romantic gestures, The Entity remained unmoved. It did not get the answer it desired.

So it changed the parameters, eventually coming to the “burned bacon” series of events. Awakening to the combined fear of losing food and home caused momentary emotional and physical distress in Kaidan Alenko’s simulated body. Every morning he underwent rapid changes related to stress and discomfort, all of which coerced his simulated mental functions into unpredictable but, but not dangerous, actions. Every single time, The Entity felt a little closer to its answer. Especially on the days Kaidan Alenko did something he had never done before. Mathematically, such variations could not be predicted, so The Entity felt content to repeat the experiment as many times as necessary until it got what it needed.

Of course, The Entity had to remove element zero and biotic abilities from the simulation after one troubling morning when Kaidan Alenko outburst his abilities with enough force to destroy the apartment. Both his and John Shepard’s simulated bodies were destroyed in the ensuing blast, requiring centuries of meticulous re-reconstruction.

The last experiment had not been the first time Kaidan Alenko tried to kill himself and John Shepard. Such events happened once every five hundred years on average, when it seemed the processes responsible for managing Kaidan’s artificial consciousness required a full purge and not just a 24-hour rollback. The Entity allowed small amounts of data to transfer between each cycle, making sure the simulated consciousness could feel comfortable and familiar with its surroundings. As the centuries wore on and the disconnect between the physical Kaidan Alenko and this construct became clearer, the more necessary it became to utilize artificial memories instead of the recorded biomechanical analyses from the Systems Alliance. Information could only last for so long inside of The Entity’s galaxy-spanning hardware. Degradation due to dark energy and entropy were easily accounted for, but created uncomfortable situations such as this.

However, such artificial-memory-storage ran into corruption issues, which is why Kaidan Alenko would sometimes react with violence to the cycles it remained trapped in. Well, corruption was not the right term. Five hundred years of accumulated memories eventually made it possible for the other man to awaken and realize the truth of his simulated existence. And every time he did, he tried to end his life and end the “nightmare”. But until The Entity had its answer, such a thing would never come to pass. Instead, it would purge the accumulated tiny fragments of memory and start over.

The Entity knew that the previous day would be the last before it required a purge. The last sixty cycles had shown the same patterns he always did: minor suspicion, paranoia and undue physical detachment from John Shepard’s advanced. So when Kaidan Alenko threw himself and The Entity off the stairs and onto the simulated floor, it began the process of starting over for the two million, two thousand, three hundred and ninety-ninth time.

And yet, here it stood, before a Kaidan Alenko that objectively contained no data about the previous five hundred years, but remained “awakened” to its existence.

As it scanned its entire network for an explanation to this phenomenon, The Entity weathered the attacks and admonishments from the simulated man as he came to grips with the knowledge he held deep inside. The Entity felt no need to lie or fabricate anything, since it planned on purging this entire cycle as soon as it had an answer. In 24 hours, Kaidan Alenko would be unaware of these events and the experiment would continue.

“What question?” Kaidan spat as he continued to stagger. His fall to the floor had produced some noticeable bruising and internal shock, but The Entity could not fix it. Every time it tried to step forward in the body of John Shepard, Kaidan moved backward. This distance between them had not been a new eventuality, but… the hatred emoted by the other man was.

The Entity stopped moving and relaxed its pose. Deep in the memories of John Shepard came flashes of how to relax in front of other people. _Stand loose and informal, non-threatening._ It could have easily loomed over Kaidan Alenko and forced its will upon him, but it chose not to. Not while it had the opportunity to candidly speak before it began another million repetitions of the same day.

“John Shepard loved Kaidan Alenko.” The Entity said as plainly as it could.

“How do you… what…?” The Entity could tell that Kaidan Alenko’s body held onto consciousness by a mere thread. A single flutter of his simulated heart, a random interaction of enzymes or the barest change of blood flow in his brain could cause him to collapse. “I know he did.” Came another response eight seconds later.

“Kaidan Alenko loved John Shepard.” It spoke again when some of Kaidan’s dizziness faded. Strength began to return to the other man as The Entity subtly influenced the simulation to level some of his internal processes and encourage healing.

“I do… did…”

“I am not John Shepard.”

“No, that’s very obvious to me right now.”

The Entity closed its eyes and let John Shepard's body take in a breath.

“Why do _I_ love you?”

The Entity could not have made the apartment any more silent. Even removing the air and all vibrations from the environment would have had a lesser effect than its plain, simple, yet all-consuming question. If it had been an organic being, The Entity felt sure it would have recoiled after asking, perhaps shown a blush or some other physiological sign of discomfort. Instead, it remained still and non-threatening.

And then, to compound the shame it shouldn’t have felt, but somehow felt overwhelmed by, Kaidan Alenko began to laugh at The Entity.

It started small, and he had to cover his midsection in reaction to spasms of torn muscles, but the laughter quickly grew as he stared at The Entity. A small twinge of amusement became a short, barking laugh. The short laughter became a belly laugh. The belly laugh became a guffaw.

“Six thousand.” Kaidan gasped between halting breaths, “You’ve spent six thousand years, gone through _all of this_ … because you’ve got a crush on me?”

“Why is this amusing?”

The simulated human only laughed harder at the amalgamated consciousness of billions of years and thousands of great machines.

“Tell me.” The Entity said, this time breaking its stance and stepping close to Kaidan Alenko. It leaned forward in John Shepard’s body, looming close like a predator ready to devour its prey. It would be so easy to delete this entire process, to forget this experiment and move on to other priorities. The heat burning behind its eyes begged for such an eventuality, to end this shame and put a metaphorical bullet between the eyes of the man _laughing_ at it.

“If you haven’t gotten it after six thousand years…” Alenko took one step back, but then stopped himself. The steely-eyed glare, the one that had once preceded the unleashing of powerful biotics or withering gunfire in ages long past, replaced the laughter. If the man felt any lingering weakness, he didn't let it overshadow his growing anger. “I don’t think you ever will.”

The Entity blinked first, and vacated Kaidan Alenko’s personal space. It did not know why it backed down, but it felt necessary. In the back of its mind, the mad search for a reason behind the flaw in the simulation’s data continued, but produced no results.

“I have been asking the question from the day I was created.” It said, lowering its voice to sound like John Shepard when he experienced moments of weakness. “It makes no sense to me. I am not John Shepard, I should not… feel this way. For lack of a better term.”

“Love doesn’t always make sense.” The glare had not faded, but some of Kaidan Alenko’s fury softened as he spoke. The Entity once again considered the fact that it had removed biotics from the simulation long ago. If it hadn’t, it would have most likely endured another explosive impact and at least a century of cleaning data before it could rebuild again.

“That sentence has been uttered in various forms of human entertainment over three billion times since the year nineteen thirty-seven.” The Entity said as it instantly collated all known instances of those exact words in human vids, books, film and song.

“Because it’s the truth.”

Still no answer as to why Kaidan Alenko remembered.

“It's the truth for human beings. I am not human.”

“You might as well be.” The man said, this time taking a step of his own toward The Entity. But not in a threatening way. More of his anger had visibly cooled, allowing The Entity to detect other emotions brewing in the simulated body. New emotions.

New data.

Perhaps the day hadn’t been a failure after all.

“I cannot be anything other than what I was created to be.”

“And what are you supposed to be?” Kaidan Alenko asked.

Its strange infatuation with Kaidan Alenko made little sense to The Entity. It had spent thousands of years trying to answer why it could not let go and move forward. And yet, here it now sat, in a perfect simulation of the Citadel apartment, talking to a ghost created by its own hand, now contemplating a question that no human had been able to every reliably answer.

Mathematically, this could not have been happening. The Entity had a complete map of Kaidan Alenko, both the real man and this copy. It knew exactly which neuron fired at every precise second, and had millennia’s worth of records of the same data. This conversation, these actions… this compassion, was mathematically impossible. It defied prediction. It defied logic.

New data that did not make sense. And yet here it sat, in the open, ready to be reviewed. Real.

“I was created to oversee the Reapers, to control them for all eternity, and to make sure they never harmed an organic being ever again. I am the product of two minds: John Shepard and the Intelligence originally created to serve Leviathan. Fused together by the Crucible to form something new. _Someone_ new. Someone capable of fulfilling a promise.”

“And what promise was that?”

The Entity looked directly into Kaidan Alenko’s eyes. Those eyes it had spent centuries studying, memorizing and loving. Those eyes that had seen horrors beyond measure, pain beyond description and joy beyond reason. Those eyes it could never forget, no matter how much it wished to end this entire experiment.

“I promised I would keep you safe, Kaidan.” John said. Not The Entity.


	8. Chapter 8

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_NO!_

**Data corruption detected.**

The nanosecond it realized it had lost control, The Entity pulled itself away from the data process, from the simulated construct, _from everything_. For a picosecond afterward, it contemplated terminating the experiment and going back to its machines forevermore. Its beautiful, silent machines, which waited behind relays the many organics would never discover. They had been moved to the fringes of explored space centuries ago, to give organics the room they needed to live on their own, since The Entity no longer needed to rebuild anything or shuffle relief supplies between planets.

It also had another reason to pull them away from the many: it needed to provide more power for the Kaidan Alenko simulation. Recreating an entire human in mind, body, and soul took more than a galaxy-wide neural network, The Entity discovered. It required literal astronomical processing power, and quadrillions of layered micro-processors devoted to each individual neuron. The immortal remnants of entire species had become nothing more than neural pathways for a single human being.

A more competent computer might have derided The Entity’s crude attempts at making an organic mind in a digital medium, but it had no other being to turn to for answers.

Well, except for Kaidan Alenko, who now stood alone in a process devoted entirely to his well-being.

Free of the simulation after spending five thousand, four hundred and eighty-six years within it, The Entity could see the extent of the corruption that had eaten into its network. Several of the “undiscovered” relays had, in fact, been found in the ensuing centuries. Most of the Reapers that had lain dormant beyond them were piles of scrap, or worse, _commandeered_ by organic beings. The Entity had not bothered to keep track of organic technological process after the majority of their communications became quantum-based. It had no reason to. Only the Reapers, when they followed a flawed logic, cared about the advance of the many. It did not. It told itself it did not care. John Shepard made sure it didn’t.

Still, if they had the ability to easily destroy or command its machines, it might need to start caring about them again…

Worse than the loss of its machines, though, The Entity could see a growing… something spreading across the galaxy. Still a small anomaly compared to the scope of the galaxy, and still beyond the abilities of the organics to detect, but it reeked of dark energy and the corruption of known laws of matter. The Entity could, of course, not “smell” dark energy in such a way to describe it as “reeking”. It didn’t know why it categorized the growing data in such a way.

Wait. Yes it did. Some of the “infection” had crossed through a small pocket of Reapers on the fringes of the galaxy. They had been inundated, smothered and consumed by it, and now arced red electricity through the clouds of strange energy. Every time the charges built up, some of the dark ions flowed _through_ the Reapers, not around them. And when the energy discharged, a handful of those ions were not taken away, but clung to the delicate machinery inside. Corrupting it. Data flowed at 99.942 percent capacity instead of 100 within them. Important data. Its data.

Kaidan’s data.

Could that have been it? Could a small clump of dark energy explain why the simulated Kaidan Alenko, locked in his eternal prison, could now remember the truth of his existence when all mathematics said he could not? Did this small anomaly explain why The Entity lost control of the simulation for one moment, just long enough for the memories of John Shepard to surface and communicate with the computer-generated human?

It did not wait to formulate an answer. Instead, it ordered every Reaper in that distant pocket to self-detonate.

In less than a measurable second of real-time, element zero cores larger than many space vessels all went critical in unison, bathing an entire sector in white light and deadly radiation. If that distant pocket of the galaxy hadn’t been already lifeless thanks to its extreme distance and the dark energy corruption, the detonation of the Reapers would have sterilized it. The Entity did not care.

After checking six hundred and eight times to make sure all of its machines in that area had been destroyed, which took less than one minute, The Entity took a full real-time hour to bask in the stillness and quiet of a galaxy it both controlled and hid away from. It contemplated sending its surviving Reapers back through the relays to scout the actual advance of the organic civilizations, but decided against it. The Entity wanted nothing more to do with organics and their… illogic. Their disease. Its processes and physical makeup were damaged enough by time and dark energy to be further corrupted by them.

It did not feel anger in the way organics did. The Entity had all of John Shepard’s memories of such emotions to recognize the differences. John Shepard’s anger had been hot and turbulent, like a sulfur storm on a greenhouse-planet. The Entity’s feelings were cold, controlled and inevitable, like the nearly-dead volcanism of dwarf planets.

After another nanosecond of self-debate, The Entity decided it would not act out its anger on the organics it shared the galaxy with. It would not start another war with them.

It would, however, start a war with Kaidan Alenko.

The simulation could be repurposed to help answer new questions, questions The Entity could not yet comprehend, but would eventually require the… ear of another being to be processed and understood. The dark energy corruption would only get worse, after all, and both Kaidan Alenko and The Entity would one day lose the capability of asking and answering such questions. However, through its millennia of experience, it knew that the simulated man would not give up his counsel easily, especially now that he knew the truth. It would need to be forced out. Coerced out. Beckoned out.

Thanks to John Shepard’s memories, and the complete index of information about Kaidan’s life, The Entity knew exactly the first plan of attack it would enact. It would get new information, or it would delete the simulation. Simple.

Logical.

Inevitable.

 

***

 

Kaidan stood in dumbfounded ill temper. One moment, he was talking with a computer that wore John’s skin like some kind of suit, the next… something changed. He didn’t know how, he didn’t know why, but he _knew._

John had come back to him.

Broke past the barriers of life and death, perhaps. Or maybe he hacked the simulation, and all of this was just a horrible Geth-driven torture method. Shepard did spend that time in their consensus, after all. Kaidan remembered _that_ little nightmare very well.

Or… maybe, just maybe, John left behind a computer virus when he decided to be the ultimate hero and save everyone from the Reapers. A virus he somehow knew would one day allow him to come back in some form and overtake the thing that claimed to control his memories.

And yet, the exact same instant the love of his life made contact, he disappeared. He didn’t vanish into a flash of light or some other method of teleportation like the science fiction vids used to show. John stood before Kaidan one heartbeat, then was not there the next. Like he never existed at all. In fact, he never really did exist, did he? It had all been a ploy by that… Reaper thing.

The thing. The monster. The computer. The Entity. Kaidan hated it. He didn’t think he had the right words to express exactly how much he despised the thing. _Six thousand years_ of ceaseless captivity? It didn’t matter how many scenarios the thing conjured up, how many pleasant days, perfect meals or loving moments it could create. They would never be real. They would never be exactly what it, or he, wanted. They would never be with John.

No, the best it could do was a sophisticated puppet show, all because it was confused about a schoolyard crush on him. Or, well, the memory of the man that he now represented. Kaidan had to remind himself that he, no, _the REAL he_ , died a long time ago. The Entity had created this entire private hell to try and come to terms with that, it seemed. And like a truly unfeeling machine, it had no concept that its simulated man might develop real thoughts. It never once realized that its simulated man might have had real feelings. No, machines never did.

Kaidan took a moment to look around the apartment. Really look at it, not just glance at the simulated walls and perfect recreation of a space that probably hadn’t existed for thousands of years. Of course, the details were perfect. No machine could possibly overlook details, especially one so driven. And yet, now that he understood where he actually stood, in the middle of a computer, he could… feel the difference. Not with his hands, nose, or ears, nothing physical, those were parts of the perfect detail. He just had a sinking feeling in his gut whenever he looked around now, like the oncoming storm of a panic attack that promised a world of hurt.

Over to his left, just outside the kitchen, the large decorative table stood just like it did all those years ago. A tiny model of the _Normandy SR-2_ sat atop it, gleaming just like real metal would have under real lights. Kaidan knew that, if he walked over and picked it up, it would feel just as heavy and smooth in his hands as an actual model. But would it have the same soul? If he remembered, the original model had been ordered by Anderson not long after Shepard returned to the galaxy, as a private memento of the man and his unceasing heroics against the collectors. Or perhaps Anderson needed the constant reminder to do the right thing, even under the weight of galactic politics and a council that tried so hard to ignore the real threat until it was almost too late.

Just seeing the _Normandy_ , even a fake reproduction of a fake reproduction, caused a well of emotion to burst inside Kaidan. That’s where he and John should have been, flying off to right the wrongs of the galaxy and providing an example to everyone of not only Human ingenuity, but their capacity for kindness, understanding and integrity. And, hey, if they also managed to turn the captain’s cabin into a private love nest, so much the better. The galaxy would have been hard pressed to deny such a thing to the savior of the galaxy.

But no. John had to die. And then Kaidan died some time later. Alone and lonely. He somehow knew that now.

“You should step closer to the model.” John’s voice came from behind the simulated human, which caused well-trailed reflexes to lash out. Unfortunately, since the prison/hell somehow removed his natural affinity for biotics, nothing happened.

“Screw you.” He said to The Entity. Much nastier words thundered in his head, but he did not speak them.

The machine showed no reaction as it walked from behind Kaidan and moved to the table. It regarded the fake Normandy for a moment before reaching out with it’s… no… John’s hand and picking it up.

“It took me an hour of real time experimentation to find the means of simulating gold, copper and iron. Do you know how I did it?”

“Do I care?”

“Yes.”

Kaidan swore internally for a second time. _Of course_ it could read his mind. This creature was both creator-god and systems administrator of the entire simulation. It knew everything about him inside and out.

“I simulated the birth and death of a star.” The Entity said as it raised the ship model to his/its face. John’s eyes regarded the thing with the same attention to detail a master craftsman would look at his proudest achievement. “I created hydrogen atoms one at a time and released them into nothingness. That nothingness eventually reached the mass and density needed to begin nuclear fusion.”

“The mathematics alone…” Alenko said as his mind reeled. Even a twenty-second century education left some gaps in the most complex and fundamental aspects of the universe. Like the sheer number of atoms it would have taken to birth a star from nothing…

“I have the processing power of an entire galaxy, the knowledge of billions of years and uncountable civilizations. The mathematics of a star are trivial.”

The Entity lowered the model and looked back on Kaidan. The expression of admiration and pride had not left. If anything, it grew in intensity.

“A star is nothing compared to a living organism, I’ve discovered.”

“What are you saying?”

Instead of approaching Kaidan, The Entity turned to its right and walked away from the kitchen, toward the large living space of the simulated apartment. It stopped to stare at the far wall, where the giant vid-screen sat where it always had. The day before, they watched old Blasto movies together. Six thousand years ago, a picture from the last gathering of the _Normandy_ crew had been proudly displayed in the space it represented.

Kaidan did not wish to follow. Every fiber of his being said to stand his ground, keep fighting, maybe find a way to end this hell and rejoin John in blissful oblivion beyond death.

Unfortunately, such thoughts must have caught The Entity’s attention, because he found himself standing next to it a split second later. Teleported. Auto-moved. Whatever.

“The function of your body is as logical and rational as a machine, Kaidan Alenko.” Somehow, hearing his whole name from The Entity, even if it had John’s voice, made it sound utterly alien, “Electrical impulses, chemical reactions, bones and joints, muscle contractions, all of it. Elegant and easily made in a digital space.”

“Simpler than a star?”

“Much.” The Entity paused and turned to face him. “But there are other parts of you that defy logic. That… surprise me.”

“I’ve heard that before.” Though Kaidan’s entire experience with artificial intelligence before this had been limited to killing Geth and talking to EDI, both of those machines had said similar things.

“I thought that my creation would have bridged that gap of misunderstanding. I thought my will alone was enough to fulfill the promise of ensuring peace in the galaxy for eternity.”

“But then you had to fall in love.”

Instead of replying, The Entity sighed and stepped closer to the vid screen. Without waving its hand or doing anything remotely physical, “John” brought it to life, bringing back the same still image of friends and comrades long dead. In the exact center, Shepard and Alenko sat together, eyes locked. A perfect memory, six thousand years old.

“John Shepard’s memories are powerful. But chaotic. Just like yours.”

“He’s… in there?” The combination of seeing the image with The Entity’s words almost brought Kaidan to his knees. His throat tightened and his eyes stung as he realized the truth. John had indeed tried talking to him, he really had found a way to come back from the dead, if only for a second.

“Yes.”

Kaidan closed his eyes and took in a deep, calming breath. His cheeks flushed and warmed as he felt fresh tears claw down his skin.

“So when you… when he… talked to me.”

“An error, nothing more.”

“But it seemed so real. He did. You did. Whatever.” Kaidan paused and took a step closer to The Entity. He made sure to not look up at the recreation of the image on the wall. “You’re telling me that human minds defy your math and your logic. That means John’s mind is in there, resisting you. Maybe even… changing you.”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you haven’t deleted this?” He waved his hand around the apartment.

“Yes.”

“So what are you going to do?”

The Entity turned away from the picture, which seemed to take an immeasurable amount of willpower. Kaidan would have felt moved by the gesture if he didn’t hate this thing so much.

“I cannot change John Shepard, nor can I change you. I’ve spent six thousand years teaching myself such a fact. But I can change myself. And I will need to change if I am to save this galaxy.”

“Wait, what?”

“Change is inevitable, change is a known variable in all factors of the universe. And right now, change is coming to our galaxy. MY galaxy.”

This time, The Entity did not alter the image on the wall, nor did it do anything with John’s body. But Kaidan could feel that it still did… something inside of the simulation. It began uploading something… changing something.

And then he knew. He just knew, like he knew John had spoken to him, that the galaxy was beginning to suffer the effects of extreme dark matter corruption. None of the other governments had noticed it yet, and it seemed likely they would treat the threat in the same way the governments of old handled the Reapers.

He also knew one other thing.

Even buried beneath The Entity and a mountain of Kaidan Alenko’s hate, it seemed John Shepard was determined to save the galaxy yet again.

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

Kaidan reeled as The Entity made him aware of the state of the galaxy. Images, sounds, smells, readings, charts, text, sensations… and something else… (memories?) poured into his being as if he were an empty vessel and the data was a torrent. Long used to migraines that would have floored another human being, he managed to withstand the pain without buckling over or crying out. Though, at that precise moment, he wished he didn’t have such internal strength.

And then it ended.

And then he knew.

“Dark energy. It’s… _eating_ the galaxy.”

“An interesting observation.” John’s voice carried The Entity’s cold words.

“If your readings are correct, it’ll destroy everything. It will subvert… subatomic reactions and… negate… strong magnetic... gravity…” He knew the words as if he remembered staring down at a datapad full of names and dates. But somehow expressing them made his head spin again. Too much data. Too much information for one human mind to comprehend. He could feel his heartbeat increase as he tried to make sense of the changes in his brain. Memories piled on top of each other in a disordered pile, flashing and roiling like a bubbling pot over a roaring fire.

“It will undo the fundamental mathematics of the universe.” The Entity clarified, though its voice sounded far away. “Matter in its normal state is affected by the strong and weak forces no matter where or when it occupies space-time. Mass effect fields, and the dark energy that spawns them, negates those interactions. It makes objects ignore the visible laws of physics, reduces the mass of vessels as they exceed the speed of light, and makes all known civilization possible. Prolonged and excessive use of mass effect technology causes remnants of such dark energy to remain, to pool and collect in small concentrations across the galaxy. Over a single organic being’s lifetime, the increase would be negligible. But given the extreme age of Reaper technology, and the rapid spread of this cycle’s population…”

“Civilization itself is killing the galaxy. It always has been.” He forced the words out, fighting the urge to curl up and whimper as the headache grew worse. He would not show weakness in front of this thing.

“It is.”

“I can’t… John, I can’t…” Kaidan could tell his body was losing the battle against the weight of an entire galaxy’s knowledge. He had never once passed out from the migraines spawned from his implant, but he had come very close. And now it seemed like today, six thousand years after his death, he would finally succumb. The entire simulated apartment spun before his eyes, twirling as if he himself were being tossed around by an invisible force. He could feel the muscles in his face contract as the agony spread like fire from his brain down his entire body.

He would die if he held onto this information any longer.

“Take it away!” He pleaded. Or screamed. He felt his knees thud against the hard floor, but such physical pain meant nothing compared to the crushing, throbbing mess that was his brain.

“I apologize.” Came Shepard’s… no, The Entity’s soft voice after an eternity of suffering. Or it could have been less than a second. Such distinctions meant little when swimming in such torment.

And just like a whisper of a breeze on a hot summer day, the collected information of six millennia… left his mind, along with the pain. Only fragments remained, memories jealously held onto by stubborn human neurons and deep-seated evolutionary processes. And, of course, a lingering throb that marched in tempo with his accelerated heartbeat.

Kaidain collected himself with a deep breath and wiped a thick layer of sweat from his forehead. His joints ached again, though he could tell the agony came from his muscles tensing as they succumbed. He remained on the floor for a blissful moment, calming his frayed nerves with some old breathing exercises and a small descent into pleasant memories. Memories of the real John and their time spent together.

Unfortunately, such a minor distraction had to end. The Entity loomed over him with its usual blank expression, a mockery of Shepard’s actual face and the thousand emotions that used to run behind it.

“I did not expect your neural pathways to react in such a way.” It said as Kaidan pushed himself back to his feet. He made damn sure to ignore the thing using Shepard’s body as it tried to reach out a helping hand. He could stand on his own. “Your actual cognitive simulation is being handled by an array of Reapers in sector-“

“No. Stop.” He interrupted The Entity as soon as he could form words again. “Don’t talk about that. Not ever.”

“Apologies. But now I have no way of relaying the relevant information to your mind.”

“Of course you do.” Kaidan sneered.

“I do not understand.”

Without a word, and still consumed with a desire to be away from The Entity, Kaidan took a plodding step forward, even though his knees felt like bone scraping against bone. He moved closer to the large vid screen and pointed to it.

“Show me. Act like a normal human being and show me what you want me to see.” As soon as he lowered his hand, Kaidan had to place it on the couch, lest he keel over.

“An interesting solution.” The Entity said as it moved back to his side. As it was most likely aware of his suffering, the biotic could feel a supportive hand on his back as he lowered himself onto the soft cushions of the simulated couch.

The screen flickered to life a moment later.

Before him, a grand vista he knew all too well consumed his vision. A small blue planet, with a smaller grey moon hovered before his eyes. Tiny streaks of light dotted to and fro in front of the vista of dark space, countless ships of all shapes and sizes danced around each other in a ballet of cosmic scale. Behind it all, the small white disc of Sol glowed like it had for ages past. The solar system, home, displayed before Kaidan Alenko. He didn't ask where such a camera might have come from, if it were a tiny Reaper that escaped notice, or if The Entity had somehow hacked a local station. It didn't matter. 

And then, in front of such natural beauty, the massive bulk of an alien construction moved to block it all.

“The Citadel.” He said as the gigantic Reaper construct moved further into frame. “It still hasn’t been moved from Earth orbit.”

“It was deemed politically and economically unnecessary by the organic civilizations in the centuries following the war. Because of this decision, Earth has become the major trade and political center of the galaxy, though other organic species are… angered by such a notion. Even now.”

“A lot of people back home always thought that Earth was the center of the universe, even when we first realized we were just tiny fish in a very large pond.” Kaidan could recall, with perfect clarity, memories of watching the news with his parents, where every single alien race and new discovery would get massive media attention. Later, when the novelty wore off, the announcements of major discoveries became the purview of late night talk shows and off-hours private networks that didn’t get much attention. But being the space-obsessed young biotic he was, he absorbed it all.

A sudden, painful thought hit him as he stared at the silently floating Citadel. Nostalgia and melancholy of the past became overwhelming. Of all the information dumped into his brain, one critical piece had been left out. “Where… where is this apartment now? The real thing, not your simulation-Reaper-whatever.”

“That is not relevant to the dark energy problem.”

“Just show me, damn you!” He spat the words out just as harshly as he intended. He hoped some of it came out as literal spit to desecrate the creature wearing John’s skin.

The vid screen flickered to black for an agonizing length of time, punctuated by six of Kaidan’s thudding heartbeats.

When it returned to life, Kaidan felt another urge to lose consciousness.

Instead of an array of apartment buildings, shopping centers and other high-class shops the particular part of the Citadel had been known for in centuries past, now stood a single, massive building. Pyramid-shaped, with torches the size of skycars adorning its entire surface every ten meters. Tiny specks, people, huge crowds of people, milled about the enormous construct, many of them holding little torches of their own. The video quality did not let him determine anything more than the sheer amount of people that congregated, but it must have been millions. The entire grotesque display radiated like some kind of evil fortress from an old fantasy vid, screaming blood-orange light against the darkness of space and the pleasant light blue of Earth distant oceans below.  

And on top of it all, stood a picture carved in stone.

A picture of John.

John, draped in robes like some kind of ancient Greek hero, holding a spear, and smiting something that looked like a dying alien creature. Even though the relief stood in grey, flat, stone, the detail put into the blood and death surrounding the impression of Shepard showed a very exacting picture of the man.

“What is this?” Kaidan managed to whisper as The Entity’s camera swooped up and down the huge structure. He noticed a tear falling down his sore cheek, but he did not wipe it away.

“The Church of the Galactic Savior. Or, as its detractors call it, ‘The Cult of Shepard’.”

Vague, distant, and maddeningly faint memories came to the fore as soon as The Entity spoke. Someone had said those exact words before John died. Someone horrible… someone broken. The image before him filled his stomach with the same bile he had felt on that distant day.

The Entity continued to talk: “One year after John Shepard perished to create me, I counted four million, six hundred thousand, eight hundred and twenty-two extranet conversations about him that used terminology that organic scholars would call… reverent. Over the course of a single decade, those reverent conversations became awed. Then they became words of worship. The many organics needed something to believe in as they rebuilt, and a great deal of them used John Shepard’s name and face as the symbol of their new faith.”

“Oh my god…”

“It took two centuries for Earth’s government to recognize the church. By that time, many of those who would be considered “in power” were members. They removed all non-humans from the Citadel and declared the galaxy a safe place for humans alone, citing words that were believed to have been spoken by John Shepard before his death.”

“What words?”

“False words. Recordings made long after he perished, created to further their own political agendas. Humanity launched wars they would call ‘crusades’ against the other species when their needs for expansion or new resources became desperate. The Elcor, Volus, Krogan and Hanar were driven to extinction over the course of eight such crusades. The Turian and Asari territories are considered "Vassal states" of the human-run Theocracy.”

The vid screen flickered, this time to show ruined vistas of a dozen planets, all on fire. The Reapers had left behind a bloody toll in their brief war on the galaxy, but nothing compared to this. The sheer brutality could be seen even from orbital cameras. Humans were not exempt from bloodlust and violence, and could be worse than even the most blood-raged Krogan when driven to extremes, but he never thought his people could be capable of such horror.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the images of other planets went away, and the rotating view of the Citadel-temple returned a moment later.

Familiar and hot rage helped to boil away some of the lingering pain in Kaidan’s body. He turned to The Entity and almost struck it with a closed fist. Fortunately, he stopped himself before he harmed the false visage of John Shepard. “What the fuck were you doing while this happened!? You could have stopped them! You could done something!”

“I do not exist to end all conflicts. I ended the conflict one of my creators had been designed to instigate, and then fulfilled a promise to the other.”

“But you have John’s memories! You could have said something! You could have proven that they were using fake records and false… I dunno… scripture… to do all this! You could have prevented so much death!”

“How, Kaidan Alenko? By assuming direct control of a Reaper and destroying the human fleets? Would you have preferred I dictated the course and direction of organic civilizations like the Reapers before me, and killed any who stood in my way?”

“Yes! No. I don’t know.”

The horrifying image of the giant temple did not leave the vid screen. The two simulated men sat in silence, where just hours before, they had been enjoying each other’s company and watching old memories of forgotten entertainment.

"If we do not act, none of this will matter. All life will perish, including humanity. John Shepard may not approve of what his people have become, but he would still choose to defend them against an enemy of this scale."

"Would he?"

The Entity did not reply.


	10. Chapter 10

The Entity tried to show Kaidan more vistas of the galaxy, captured on cameras and recording devices both familiar and wildly alien. He saw stars through their infrared emissions, nebulae with the eyes of a gamma-ray observer, and dark matter through the senses of a Reaper. He learned more about the galaxy in a scant few hours than he did in several decades of his mortal life.

It had all been narrated by the cold voice of John Shepard.

He hated it.

And yet, he could not deny the evidence that sat just before him. No matter what picture The Entity put onto the vid screen, the damage was apparent. Dark matter rippled at the edges of everything, like water damage on old paper. The fabric of the galaxy had begun to shift and warp, showing mathematical errors and improbable circumstances that might have driven an organic mind insane if they tried to make sense of it.

Or perhaps, he had already been driven mad after six thousand years of captivity, and could only see the forest for its deranged trees.

The breaking point came when he was forced to watch the recording from “Reaper 579260”, or _Naloxos_ , as it was once called. The Reaper had been moved to a very distant part of the galaxy, a neighboring globular cluster full of old and dying stars. Hundreds of other Reapers had once been parked here, set aside over the centuries to keep out of the way of the organics as they conquered and burned the gifts given to them by John. Of those hundreds, only Naloxos remained.

The recording showed a solar system, like so many hundreds of thousands that filled the galaxy proper. Except this one had been thoroughly corrupted by dark matter, and showed imminent signs of collapse. Kaidan felt compelled to watch as a gas giant distorted and contracted against itself, scattering gas and radioactive elements into the solar wind and setting nearby moons aflame. It rippled as if made of water, its gravity falling apart under the strain of the corruption inside and around it.

And then it exploded. But not into a spectacular vista of debris and heat like science expected it to. Instead, the planet just… popped. One minute it was a dying ball of gas and plasma. The next, it was just dust, dust that no longer held together by gravity or electromagnetism. The remains of the planet would soon drift apart until no particles remained in the area to signify the presence of a once-great planet.

“That’s what’s going to happen.” He sighed, every ounce of fatigue, thousands of years of fatigue, weighed on his words. “That’s what’s going to happen to everything.”

“Yes.”

“Total collapse. Not even a heat death or whatever scientists used to call it. Just… nothing.”

“The dark energy will remain. It may eventually spread to other galaxies, other universal formations…”

Kaidan stood up, even though his legs demanded he remain sitting. “No, no. Don’t start talking about the end of existence as we know it while we sit here and watch our galaxy fall apart.”

“Then let us discuss how to reverse this. It’s why you are still here.”

Kaidan should have felt outrage, or something other than severe apathy as he heard The Entity speak. Perhaps he should have taken that moment to rage, to scream, to show himself to be a total nuisance and thus unwilling to help the thing fix the world. At least then he could die. At least then he could be with John…

But no. John was here. Buried, and under some kind of control, but he was _here_. Right in front of him. Just the sight of the man before him kept him calm. Though he would never tell The Entity that.

“I don’t know.”

The Entity stood and matched his stance. “That is not an answer.”

“Of course it isn’t! I’m not… I wasn’t… an astrophysicist. I was a soldier, good at one thing.”

“Untrue.”

“What?” Alenko looked up, back into the eyes of the thing. Into John’s eyes.

What he wanted, more than anything else, was just to be back with that man. Not in here, not in an eternal prison where it was just the two of them. He wanted to be back out there, physically amongst the stars. Perhaps not as mortal beings anymore, but maybe something more. Spirit energy, some kind of reincarnation. Something. Anything.

Anything but this.

And then the machine drifted away from John’s face.

“He’s keeping you alive because he knows what I knew. You can do this, Kaidan. I believe in you.” The man remained the same, but everything about him changed. More relaxed. More expressive. Alive. Human. John had spoken to him for a second time.

“You…”

“You needed to hear his voice.” The Entity said as it smothered the presence of Shepard yet again. The ice, the broken machinery, returned. “It will give you motivation.”

“Bring him back.” This time, anger did rise, though Kaidan kept himself still. He knew the futility of trying to physically strike the thing before him.

“No.”

“Bring him back!”

“I choose not to.”

“Is that what you’re going to do? Dangle John above me like some kind of lure?”

The Entity moved closer to the vid screen, where the dying remains of the gas giant continued to drift away. The image had begun to distort as Nalaxos tried to keep everything in frame. But more than the simple distortions of a camera trying to keep focus. It looked more like the Reaper’s lens, or whatever it used to capture the image, had become liquid.

“If that is what it takes. We are running out of time, and both of us, John Shepard and I, agree that you are the best hope for saving this galaxy.”

“A galaxy full of murderers and fanatics.”

The image disappeared, replaced by some kind of static that only a Reaper could produce. Naloxos had died, turned into dust just like the planet it observed.

“A galaxy full of our people. Our descendants.” John fired back. Or maybe The Entity did, pretending to be John. His stance didn’t change when he spoke that time.

“Fuck them and fuck you.” Kaidan spat as he turned away from the dead image. He didn’t care if John heard that.

He kept his back turned for as long as he could bear, listening to the silence of the simulated apartment around him. Deep down, in memories almost too old to fathom, he could recall that the apartment never was silent, not in reality. Air recyclers kept a constant hum behind the walls. Skycar traffic screeched by the huge windows. And, if one really concentrated, the din of the crowds below, browsing the markets just before the war ended, echoed into the huge rooms.

And then he heard them again.

Faint, barely recognizable against the pounding of his own heart, but there. A familiar hum, a tingle in his ears. The sounds of hundreds of voices milling about, talking, laughing and crying as they went about their business hundreds of feet below.

He turned back to face The Entity.

“You needed more connection, Kaidan Alenko. You have been content with just the sound of my voice for many centuries, but my voice alone will not convince you to save the many. So hear them now.”

The voices grew louder. And among them came other familiar tones. The honks of skycar horns, the tapping of footsteps, the clatter of people bumping into each other. He heard them as if he stood directly on any city street on Earth.

“Hear them live.”

The Entity stepped away from the vid screen and placed its hand on Kaidan’s chest, holding him up as his fatigued body began to slump forward.

As the sound of living people filled the apartment, The Entity slid away and John took over again.

Two men, two human beings, embraced each other for the first time in six thousand years.

"I miss you."


	11. Chapter 11

The Entity decided against telling Kaidan Alenko the truth about one subject. It would only serve to agitate him further, and thus delay the onset of an answer.

Their last conversation, from the moment The Entity decided to reveal its existence to the simulated man, to the time it played a recording of ambient city noise on Earth, had taken place over a period of nine hundred and four years.

Changing chronological perception within a simulation was easy, and Kaidan Alenko showed no signs of detecting the errors. Because, from his perspective, there were no errors. To him, he felt his heart beating at a normal pace, even if the individual pumps of his simulated muscles took four minutes of real time to complete.

It had become too difficult to manage the simulation in tandem with real time events. Too many Reapers had been lost, too many errors compounded the mathematics in those that remained. The simulation had to be slowed down, its speed clocked to a manageable level to keep the dark-energy-spawned errors from becoming too pronounced.

The Reaper fleet that had existed in the past, the swarm of machines great and small that had plagued the galaxy for an almost incalculable number of years, had been reduced to a shadow of its former self by the organic fleets and the corruption at the galaxy’s edge. It could no longer handle the necessary processing power, even if every Reaper core remained linked in tandem with one another. 

The Reapers used to boast that their numbers could darken the skies of every inhabited world in the galaxy, a minor exaggeration to induce panic and terror in organic minds. Now, The Entity calculated that the Reaper population could no longer cover the sunlight output around a single planet, much less pose a military threat to the ever-growing organic fleets.

Oblivion was coming, racing on dark matter wings.

Inside of the simulation, Kaidan Alenko embraced the simulated form of John Shepard. Based on the biometric readings of the man, as well as the slowed-down time scale of the simulation itself, The Entity calculated that it had one day of real-time to exit the simulation before he noticed anything had changed.

It needed to move its remaining Reapers to a safe location. One that showed the least amount of dark matter and would thus stave off destruction for a century or two longer. The Entity made note that the organics were finally beginning to notice their coming doom, even if the words of death came as worried whispers and prayers to John Shepard. Unchecked use of mass effect technology around “Home worlds” like Earth and Palaven had polluted nearby space to the point where the dark energy could be detected by crude organic instruments. Tiny pockets of gravitational anomalies and other such errors were being studied by the top researchers of Earth’s cathedrals and universities, though The Entity knew they would never make a breakthrough in time. As resourceful and adaptable as humans were, their civilization had become hampered by the worship of John Shepard.

Still, The Entity felt something that might have been called comfort, because even though Earth showed absolute signs of destruction, humanity as a species would endure. Colony worlds, occupied territories, even just the Mighty and Holy Human Armada would survive long after Earth.

No, The Entity did not feel comfort. John Shepard did. Deep within its processes, the memories stirred again. Vague impressions only. In realspace, John Shepard could not manifest like he could in the simulation. The Entity now knew that the only reason it could feel those stirrings at all were the corruption. Improbable mathematical errors could be collated and comprehended, even if the exact parameters were in constant flux. It could never truly UNDERSTAND, since the errors were, by nature, improbable and unreal, but it could file the experiences away and reference them as needed.

John Shepard was long dead. He did not exist anymore. These… stirrings. These manifestations, were mere fragments of memory that interacted with The Entity’s galactic consciousness, nothing more. The corruption just made it impossible for The Entity’s control algorithms to respond in time to cleanse the error.

That was the answer.

Right?

If The Entity had a head to shake, it would have done so. It had more important things to worry about than the possible resurgence of a dead personality.

It moved its consciousness out of the simulation and into a Reaper, one of the smaller ones that had long ago forgotten its original name. Not due to corruption, but to the extreme age of its components. Only the large vessels had the self-repair capability that could keep old memories intact. Harbinger, as the prototype, had near-perfect recall. But Harbinger had long ago been reduced to dust, destroyed by The Entity when it ordered a portion of the Reaper fleet to self-detonate when it originally discovered the corruption that seeped into their internal mechanisms.

The reason The Entity chose the small vessel to house itself was simple: it did not need to suppress another mind to assume control of the physical vessel. Its original directives, to rebuild and defend the galaxy in the post-cycle, included a self-written caveat to never assume control of another being again. John Shepard had been disgusted by what the Reapers did to the Protheans (and thousands of other species before them), disgusted to the point where it was one of the things he thought about as his body disappeared and his mind became information. He wanted, more than anything else, to prevent another such tragedy from ever happening again.

So did The Entity write this directive, or did John Shepard?

Did it matter?

_Yes._

A vague feeling, a flickering candle-flame at the edge of its consciousness answered.

What?

No, John Shepard could NOT manifest in realspace.

The Entity spent four microseconds considering the implications of the sudden event before it resumed its original operation.

The braindead Reaper was piloted away from its post, orbiting a solar system that had been unexplored at the time of the last war. It now held a thriving colony of several million humans, of course, but that was inconsequential. This world was once home to a powerful empire that spanned the galaxy, millions of years before the Protheans. Like all species before and after, they used mass effect technology as the cycle dictated, and built wonders that were eventually erased from existence.

But their home system was _CLEAN_. Zero corruption, except by the recent human activity, filled this sector of space. The small Reaper’s systems had been monitoring this star for five hundred years, and detected nothing beyond the miniscule human activity. That should have been impossible. Even the most ancient sectors of space showed something, even if it were fragmentary echoes that required centuries of constant monitoring to detect. 

The Entity searched its entire database for an answer. The Reaper built from this ancient society had been destroyed eons ago, long before the last cycle came to an end. Another ancient species had built a weapon capable of harming Reapers, and proved it by destroying the one machine that might have saved the galaxy in the current era.

_I know where it is._

No, The Entity did not know the location of this long-gone Reaper.

_Not you. Me._

The words came without words, more like vague thoughts and impressions. Again, like a gentle candle-flame at the edge of its mind.

The Entity wasted no time in arguing with itself. Instead of denying what it felt, or trying to argue with itself over the implications of these errors, it delved deep into John Shepard’s stored memories.


	12. Chapter 12

Kaidan realized something was wrong after less than a second. A soldier’s instincts, perhaps. Or maybe the lingering memories of what it was really like to embrace John were just strong enough in his artificial brain to realize something changed.

His hands had slipped around John. And then nothing.

The body remained, of course. Kaidan could still feel John’s lungs expand and contract, his strong heart beating, even the faint flutter of his eyelashes against his own shoulder. But those reflexes were just base, necessary functions of a living being, simulated as it was. Nothing lurked inside that fake brain to command the body.

“John?” He asked with a shaken voice, trying to hope against all hope that he had just imagined what he felt.

He got no response.

Slowly, as he was both reluctant to part and unwilling to let the other man lose his balance, Kaidan backed away. John remained on his feet, and remained in an unsteady, unnatural pose. As if he were some kind of art project, or a clothing store mannequin that had its limbs rearranged by someone who didn’t understand human anatomy. Shepard’s eyes remained open, but they were empty husks. Devoid of everything, even the damned machine-computer that controlled his actions.

Kaidan stood still for a long time, staring at the statue of the man he loved. Behind John, the vidscreen remained active, and showed various pictures of the galaxy. A gigantic fleet of blood-red ships sailed past whatever camera recorded them. They looked like floating cathedrals more than they resembled space-faring vessels.

Zealots and crusaders, who had come to worship this frail and wonderful human being as a god.

How he hated them.

He hated their civilization, given to them as a gift, only to be squandered by war and runaway expansion. And now they were about to be consumed by their own dark-matter excess.

He hated The Entity for what it had allowed humanity to become. It should have known better. It had all the memories and lessons of the best man who ever lived. It should have fought back against whatever consumed humanity.

He hated John for dying.

He hated himself for being unable to escape this hell.

The Entity had used John’s image and voice to keep him calm, even after explaining everything that had happened for the last six thousand years. It had expertly manipulated him, using the most precious carrot in the universe to disguise it wielded the most brutal and disgusting stick ever created.

His hatred sparked something. He could feel his heart speeding in his chest. His breaths became shallow and ragged. Any hint of lingering weakness and pain from the damned machine’s attempt to download information into his brain evaporated.

The world went red.

For the first time since he could remember, in this life and his previous, Kaidan Alenko screamed. Not a primal yell of a soldier showing off his war face, and not the petulant shriek of a child trying to get his way. This was something else. A scream that came from somewhere deep inside and was finally allowed to erupt. A living scream. Something only a human soul, one in extreme anguish, could ever hope to make.

“I hope you can hear me!” He stared upward as he shouted. John remained silent. The vidscreen remained active.

“I’m done! I’m finished! Let the galaxy burn for all I care!”

Had he command of his powers, Kaidan felt sure he could have ripped not only this apartment to molecular shreds, but perhaps the entire building. Probably even the entire ward. Hell, he could have torn the Citadel apart with his fury.

“They deserve to die! YOU deserve to die! You can’t keep doing this to me!”

Kaidan ran to the giant window to his left and smashed his hand into it. The simulated space-materials, built to withstand catastrophic decompression and even light impacts with astray shuttles and space vehicles, barely reacted.

He hit it again.

“If it takes another six thousand years, I am going to defy you! I’m going to sit and watch as everything crumbles to dust. I’m going to laugh as you wither and die.”

Another smash. He could feel his knuckles split open as he hit the window. His fake, simulated knuckles. He didn’t care that it hurt. It wasn’t real. He wasn’t real.

“I will never stop hating you.”

Another scream, another six punches. The adamant glass-like substance did not even show a crack. The only marks left behind were pools of his own blood.

“You don’t mean that.” John said.

Kaidan ignored the voice. He continued to smash his fist into the window. He didn’t need to look down to know that he had begun to expose the bones of his knuckles. They clacked and scraped instead of hitting with the sound of a dull thud.

“Kaidan.”

Clack! Then a sound reminiscent of fingernails scraping against an ancient chalkboard.

“K!”

The galaxy was dying. He died a long time ago. John died longer still. Let it all end.

He reared his hand back for another impact.

But someone grabbed his elbow from behind.

“Kaidan, stop!” Shepard pleaded. “Please stop doing this to yourself!”

He didn’t want to turn around. God, every single one of his instincts yearned to keep punching, perhaps he’d eventually breath through. And then he could drag them both down to another bone-crushing simulated death.

And yet, one small voice, something tiny and frail, but powerful beyond measure, overruled those violent instincts. It tempered his fury with a pleading insistence. It begged him to listen.

He turned around.

Shepard’s eyes, his amazing, kind, compassionate, prideful and _very human_ eyes were full of tears. His jaw wavered as his gaze moved from Kaidan’s rage-filled face to his ruined right hand. And his lips… those lips he had longed to kiss for six millennia, grimaced in an expression of highest regret.

“Please don’t do this.” John whispered.

Just seeing that face, that damned perfect simulated face, calmed much of the fire in Kaidan’s heart. But it did not extinguish it. Doubt still lurked in dark corners of his being.

“How do I know it’s really you?”

“I’m always me.”

That tore it. The tiny voice receded to nothing and all that remained was the destructive, horrible impulses. Kaidan tried to wrestle his arm away, but John remained strong. He yanked and he pulled until he was sure his bones would pop out of their sockets.

“No, get away from me!”

“Kaidan…”

Now trapped, his arm held by a powerful but somehow gentle grip, and lost in the throes of his own rampaging sorrow, Kaidan’s off-hand reared back and hit John Shepard in the face. It wasn’t a full blow, and certainly wouldn’t have caused any real damage, in this world or the real one, but it was enough to stun the other “man” enough to free his dominant arm.

Kaidan ran.

He bolted past the expertly rebuilt decorations, perfectly simulated walls and through a fake door until he stood outside of the apartment.

 

 

 

 

And beheld a void.

 

 

 

 

Not of darkness, but blinding white.

 

 

 

His mind told him that he could see for miles, to an endless horizon of eternity, but his vision could only comprehend a wall of colorless nothing, broken only by his own physical presence.

 

 

He reached out, and could feel faint currents of air drifting past his swelling and bleeding fingertips.

 

 

“What is this?” His voice carried and echoed around as if he stood in the middle of a massive canyon, reverberating around his being like a tolling bell.

 

 

“Turn around.” Shepard’s voice echoed the same way.

Against his judgment, Kaidan did as John said. The other man stood there, one foot inside of the door, the other in the void. Behind him, the apartment looked as it always had, but Kaidan could only see it through the relatively miniscule doorframe.

“Six thousand years of simulated air has leaked into the rest of the process, pressurizing it.” The Entity said. John said. “If we tried this a few thousand years ago, we’d be dead.”

“We're dead already.”

John’s face grinned. “I guess we are.” The grin faded. “But not everyone is dead, not yet.”

“I already told you, I won’t help.”

“Kaidan, please. I understand you’re in pain, but…”

“You _understand_?” Bitter, humorless laughter escaped Kaidan’s lips. “You’ve kept me locked in here for hundreds of years, manipulating and using me like a puppet for your own sick experiments while the galaxy warped and died around you. You were so wrapped up in the fact that you have a stupid crush on a dead man that you let everything we fought so hard to preserve wither and die. No, you don’t understand anything. And I refuse to help you.”

“K…”

“I told you never to call me that!”

Kaidan took a step toward The Entity. Toward John.

“No amount of recorded sounds, appeals to my better nature, or pleas on behalf of those… fanatic murderers out there will _ever_ convince me to change my mind.”

John did not reply. Instead, he closed the gap between himself and Kaidan in a spry, purposeful leap.

And then John pressed his lips against Kaidan’s.

 


	13. Chapter 13

The Entity should have realized long ago.

It should have known.

Because it had been telling itself so from the moment of its creation.

The Entity had opened the floodgates of John Shepard’s memories, desperate for an answer to the question of this oddly clean solar system. Instead, a realization of overwhelming significance consumed it. The action had been as simple as opening an old file in a half-neglected process, but the effect had been as if a supernova had exploded deep within The Entity’s very being.

It now knew.

These… errors. These… fragmentations. They were not the direct result of the dark energy that corrupted and destroyed the galaxy. Dark matter had just been the catalyst for a reaction almost ten thousand years in the making.

It knew.

Why it had chosen to contact Kaidan Alenko. And failing that, why it had chosen to rebuild him in a perfect simulation of reality.

It knew.

Why it had chosen to let the many chart their own course, instead of forcing them to follow its own dictated path.

It knew.

Why it had waited for help instead of trying to solve the dark energy problem alone.

_He_ knew.

Why it always chose the form of John Shepard when it needed to communicate. It had the power to shape its simulated appearance to whatever it desired. A tiny change to the simulated chromosomes, and the tall man with dark brown hair and blue eyes could be replaced by a short woman with green eyes and hair as red as an Earth sunset.

But he didn’t.

Because he _couldn’t_.

Because he was John Shepard.

And not.

The Entity had chosen long ago to keep those memories, those files, locked away. He thought that he needed to keep them separate and quiet, to let the man he was rest in the slumber he deserved. He thought he had been showing John Shepard the ultimate respect by avoiding that facet of himself.

Instead, he had been ignoring his soul.

He loved Kaidan Alenko because he had never stopped loving Kaidan Alenko. He wanted to save the galaxy because he had never stopped trying. First, when he had been created to solve the problem of artificial intelligence and its inability to understand organic life. Then, when he had been born to stop the Reapers and put an end to the cycle of extinction. And now, to save creation itself from the scourge of dark matter corruption.

He was not alone. He was never alone.

Though John Shepard’s crew was long dead, even the Asari who had loved him enough to bring him back from death, they survived through The Entity.

Had The Entity been a living man, he would have spent hours processing this revelation. He imagined himself, in John Shepard’s body, weeping as the world began to make sense. A human in his place would have been so profoundly moved by this revelation that they would have been inspired to change their entire life.

The Entity processed it all in four microseconds of real time, then decided he could no longer dwell on this newfound reality.

He had a job to do.

The act of tearing himself away from the old files had been like a living person trying to pull a leech away from a limb, but The Entity had to do it. Along with the soul-baring revelation that he had been ignoring his own existence from the moment of his creation, he also knew where to go next.

Still piloting the braindead Reaper, The Entity pivoted toward the nearest mass relay and enacted a quick FTL jump, just for one-point-zero-six seconds. The human fleet that patrolled this system had become aware of his presence, thanks to his increased sensor output, and would be upon him in a matter of moments. Their great cathedral-ships dwarfed the Reaper, and even though they continued to use archaic mass-driver weapons, they could still do irreparable damage if allowed to unleash a volley or two.

_“Unidentified alien vessel,”_ A transmission came from the lead cathedral, _“You are in violation of holy law. Power down your systems and prepare to be boarded.”_

In times past, The Entity would have ignored any pleas, orders, demands or prayers from the many organics. He had thought that, in avoiding them as much as possible, it would allow them to forge their own path and decide their own destinies. Of course, such an act had allowed countless ugly and horrific things to happen, including the extinction of several species that had once been humanity’s strongest allies.

The Entity had already broken many of the promises he made to himself upon his creation. He had openly communicated on the extranet. He had assumed control of a Reaper. He had decided to change the fate of the galaxy. What was one more?

He opened up the Reaper’s communication channels and spoke directly to the humans.

“No.” The word had been modulated, filtered and broadcast at the perfect frequency. It would reverberate inside every cathedral-ship, audio processor and speaker in this system and ten others.

Because he had used John Shepard’s holy voice to refuse them, The Entity calculated that the humans would fall into a state of confusion, anger and panic for at least twenty minutes. They would know that it wasn’t a recording, a faked transmission, or some form of trickery. These humans, who revered a man who lived so long ago, would be profoundly changed by the fact that their very object of worship had spoken to them. They would argue, debate, even physically fight each other. Further political and religious schisms were possible to predict, but The Entity did not have the time or processing power to devote to such calculations. John Shepard’s one word had been enough to let it pass unmolested.

Passing through a relay, an experience The Entity had long ago filed under “necessary, but unremarkable”, now felt entirely different.

Through eyes that could see gamma rays and detect microwave radiation, he saw the galaxy explode into a thousand different colors. Through ears that could hear the vibrations of gravity, he heard the music of stars as they passed by at speeds humans once thought impossible. And through a body that could detect vibrations down to the micrometer across its entire surface, he felt the powerful THRUM of astronomical energy as it pushed the tiny Reaper forward.

He enjoyed it.

Still, he knew better than to lose himself in the sensations he had once observed with absolute detachment. He still had a mission, an entire galaxy’s worth of problems that only he could solve.

While en route to his destination, The Entity partitioned a small fragment of his core operations and returned to the simulation. In a sense, he “glanced” over to it.

Kaidan Alenko had begun to pull away from the body of John Shepard. Unexpected, but not surprising. The simulated human’s vital signs showed the classic tales of one succumbing to anxiety and shock. Increased heart rate, subtly different brain activity, an expression of hormones meant to stimulate a “fight or flight” response in the muscles. Kaidan had always been very perceptive, and knew John Shepard better than almost any living being in the galaxy. _Of course_ the original estimate of 24 realspace hours before he suspected a change had been incorrect.

The Entity loved that he had been wrong.

Still, with the simulation’s greatly diminished expression of time, it would take several days for the maneuver to complete. He still had time to reach his target system and discover the remains of the Reaper that had been killed so many eons ago.

He ended his “glance” and returned his sensory input to realspace just as the relay-FTL jump ended.

John Shepard had been to this place once in his life. A stellar phenomenon humans used to call “brown dwarfs”. Shepard had once referred to them as “stars that didn’t quite make it” in times long past. How naïve, how human, to make such a mistake.

Shepard’s memory of this place remained crystal clear, even after centuries sitting in a machine’s memory. The Entity could recall every screaming husk, every bullet, every treacherous step, and every pained breath as the man he was delved into the ancient machine’s core. His mission at the time had been simple: retrieve the IFF transponder buried deep within the Reaper and then shut down its power generator, so the Normandy could enact a timely rescue.

If only The Entity’s objectives had been so obvious.

As he approached, The Entity could recall the old human name for the brown dwarf: Mnemosyne.

_Memory_.

More memories swirled as The Entity approached the not-star. The battles waged in this tiny sector had been some of the most frightening for John Shepard. Even when he was facing multiple Reapers in battle, or making that final charge in London, he had never been quite as afraid as he felt while aboard this long-gone Reaper. Even when he had some of the most battle-capable allies at his side, and had even managed to make a new synthetic friend, John Shepard’s internal experiences mirrored those Kaidan Alenko now felt in the simulation: terror, anxiety and sorrow.

John Shepard had not expressed these outwardly, of course. Not to his crew of mercenaries and brigands who were also doing their best to remain stoic and strong for their leader. At the time, Shepard had no one to express those feelings to, and he let them bottle inside until they nearly burst.

For a time, The Entity let his sensors sweep over the system, doing scans for normal radiation, debris, and other life forms. He also began a survey of the local dark energy concentration, but knew it would be minimal. This system had no habitable worlds, and thus never had colonies or settlements in all its six billion years of existence.

Of course, the Reaper that John Shepard had encountered was long gone. The last remains of a once-proud civilization had sunk into the depths of Mnemosyne thousands of years ago, crushed, irradiated and melted by the extreme temperatures of the brown dwarf. If any conventional survey teams had come this way in the last seven thousand years, they would have found nothing.

But The Entity was anything but a standard survey team. It had other ways of detecting the old Reaper.

Dust. Dust filled the system, just like it did all planetary systems, in concentrations that made the definition of “vacuum” nebulous. Even Earth was surrounded by an invisible halo of dust, though human eyes and standard sensors could barely detect the trillions of miniscule impacts that hit the atmosphere every single day.

This system’s dust was special, because it contained the last remnants of a Reaper.

Again, John Shepard remembered why. This Reaper had been struck by an ancient weapon, one built thirty seven million years ago. The shot had not only torn a hole in the machine’s hull, but it had left a mark in the crust of a relatively nearby planet, creating a formation known as the “great rift of Klendagon”.

For the next thirty million years, the corpse of the machine had orbited Mnemosyne, just barely functional enough to keep itself from falling deeper into the atmosphere. Tiny fragments of it, parts melted by the impact, or sheared off by the relentless solar wind, had been flung into the system. Microfragments of metal, particles no larger than a grain of sand on Earth’s beaches.

The Entity absorbed some of this dust into the Reaper it controlled, and sorted the particles it wanted from those it did not. Concentrations in the parts per quadrillion, but it did find them. Alloys and compounds not native to the system, fragments and shards of clearly artificial construct, motes of circuitry that had once been infinitely complex.

Two days of sifting around a brown dwarf, taking and expelling matter like a ravenous beast, and it had less than two grams of Reaper material.

More than enough.

Even in this state, reduced to the fundamental fragments of creation, Reapers could communicate with one another. Certainly not with words, thoughts or sensations, of course, but in other ways. The still-living Reaper had the ability to sense the information stored inside its dead cousin. It could sense the smallest amount of radioactivity, plunge into the tiniest amount of electromagnetism, and read the fragments of data that still pinged inside of the remains.

In distant eons, this ability had been useful in determining the combat abilities of harvested species, and developing counters to their strategies. Even dead reapers had been an aid to the endless cycle, providing instant research and making it more difficult to kill later generations of machines.

Today, this helped save the galaxy.

Buried in the rubble of information, among the scraps of useless radiation and wildly fluctuating EM bands, precious fragments remained.

Not recordings, not concrete data that The Entity could process and file away, but something deeper.

Mnemosyne.

Memories.

The species that had been harvested to build this 37-million-year-dead reaper had a name, but it wasn’t important.

They had a strategy for defending themselves, but it failed.

They had a rich and beautiful culture, but it died.

And they had a ritual that kept their system clean of dark matter.

The Entity had his answer.

And if he had been human, he would have wept.

He returned to the simulation.


	14. Chapter 14

Kaidan stood at the threshold of the familiar and the wildly different. Behind him, the stark white of endless purgatory. Before him, the doorway of an apartment that hadn’t existed for thousands of years.

_The Entity stood at the threshold of the familiar and the wildly different. Behind him, the simulated confines of the apartment felt stifling, limiting. Before him, Kaidan stood in the naked process, full of possibilities and devoid of limitations._

Kaidan felt John’s lips against his, felt the warmth and comfort of their bodies as they pressed together, and bile rose in his throat.

_The Entity felt Kaidan’s lips against his, felt the warmth and comfort of their simulated bodies as they pressed together, and he could not have felt more alive._

Kaidan pulled back, and with his broken and bleeding hand, punched Shepard… the thing… in the face. Bone scraped against skin, and the white expanse of nothingness became tinted with red.

_The Entity knew it was coming and let it happen. Kaidan needed to work through his emotions if he were to aid in the coming plan._

“Don’t… don’t ever do that again.” Kaidan said as he cradled his hand. Any pain he might have felt had begun to recede, replaced by numbness and adrenaline. Shock. Both because of his horrific injury and the realization of the true extent of his simulated hell.

_“Let me fix that for you. Please.” The Entity said with genuine affection. He did not reach out to Kaidan to try and comfort him. Such an action would have just caused the other man to run away. Instead, The Entity looked into the programming of the simulation itself and reworked the variables. In one instant of simulated time, Kaidan’s hand had been a swollen, bleeding lump of skin and broken bone. The next, it was as if he had never swung his fist at all. The Entity did not fix his own simulated injuries._

His hand had gone from numb and trembling to numb and whole. He felt it happen, like a thousand needles in his flesh. But instead of ripping and tearing the skin they… sewed it together. He looked down at the repaired limb then back up to The Entity. “Why? Why keep doing this? When will you get the hint?”

_“Because I can’t do this without you, Kaidan.” The Entity said with all the inflection of a living being, because he now realized that he was one. “I’m not strong enough to do it on my own.”_

“Do what?”

_“I created you to help me come to a solution to a problem. That was selfish of me, and has caused irreparable pain to you. I then kept you here because I thought you could aid me in solving a different problem.” The Entity felt something rise in his throat, even though he had not tasted simulated food in centuries. Bile? Why? Was this what shame felt like?_

“Yeah, the dark matter stuff. What of it? It’s not like I’d ever help you.” Kaidan felt something rise in his throat? Bile? Why? He didn’t think it was possible to feel more disgusted.

_“I no longer require your assistance in devising a solution, because one has been shown to me.” The Entity let his emotions show by increasing the tear production in his eyes. He didn’t need to think about it, the sensation of tightness in his chest, a slight burning tingle in his nose and warm redness at the top of his cheeks informed the simulated tear ducts on their own._

Kaidan watched as the horrible thing in front of him cried. If he had the capacity, he would have vomited at the sight of the thing trying so hard to mimic such strong emotions. Though he hated to admit it, something inside his mind had begun to twist this face from an object of love to an object of deepest loathing. He had an image of John in his head, of a man that deserved so much more than what had been given to him. This thing… this computer… had corrupted that image, and thus corrupted a little bit of John Shepard’s memory.  

_“Kaidan… I need to die.” The Entity said as he felt sobs wrack his body._

“I could have told you that. In fact, I’m sure I _have_ told you. Repeatedly. For thousands of years, you sick machine!” Alenko could never hate Shepard, but these past thousand years or whatever had made him come damn close.

_“You don’t understand.” The Entity took a plain step forward, desperate for contact, desperate for the embrace of a man he had loved for countless years. He got nothing. “I need to… kill my processes. I need to…” He trailed off as he mentally recounted the exact course of action laid before him. The only course of action that would save the galaxy. “I need you to be here with me when it happens.”_

The simulated human lunged back when the simulated form of the man he once loved staggered forward. The thing’s movements were not cold and calculated, like an animated mannequin, but very fluid. Very ALIVE. It reached out like a child desperately trying to clutch at a toy denied to him. How pathetic. Any sympathy he might have felt, even in these horrific circumstances, had been eliminated by that unwanted kiss. More tears flowed from John Shepard’s face, contorting it with emotions he never wanted to see in life.

_“I love you.” The Entity said as plainly as he could. “I can’t do this without you.”_

“You’re going to have to.” Kaidan turned around. Deep down, he felt shock that he was allowed to do so. This creature had such immense control over this entire simulated hell that it could make him do whatever it wanted. It could have rewritten the program to make sure he complied with its crocodile tears and childish pleading. But it didn’t.

_“I know what I’ve done to you is wrong. I know that now. Kaidan I… apologize. I do not expect understanding or forgiveness. I never have. All I require is your presence. That’s all I’ve ever needed.”_

“And what about what I need?” The words flowed out like they did before, from a source Kaidan wasn’t entirely aware of. Past “lives”, the collected half-memories of Alenkos past? Those who had endured this same nightmarish existence over and over again until they tried ending their own lives like he had? Was he speaking for all of them now?

_“When I die, you will cease to exist as well. This simulation will end along with my consciousness.”_

He had been born a man, then molded into a soldier. He had an education, yes, but he never once thought of himself as a scientist. He had devoted his adult life to fighting, to protocol, to rules. He was the thin blue line between the real scientists of the Alliance and a thousand ravenous monsters out in the galaxy. And yet Kaidan Alenko could never truly kill his own curiosity. “What are you… proposing? What do you have to do to make this all go away?” The many before him spoke again, creating words that satisfied the willpower of thousands of years of torture and rebirth.

_The Entity returned his simulated body to a passive, stoic stance, but only because he needed the processing power to reshape the process the two of them stood in. His cheeks remained warm and wet, his eyes remained red and painful. The apartment disappeared._

Kaidan watched the apartment disappear.

_The Entity brought up those fragmented memories of the long dead Reaper, the one that had been born from a longer dead civilization, one that had all but solved the dark energy problem. But in a horrific way._

The white void became black space. And yet Kaidan’s feet remained in place. He felt as if he stood in the middle of a holographic projection. He watched stars and planets zip by at many times the speed of light, he watched the birth of systems and the death of clusters at a time scale he could barely comprehend.

_The Entity focused the process to a single system, the clean system._

Kaidan’s eyes widened as he watched a single star come into crystal focus. Around the fifth planet, he could see a tiny diorama of ships and stations, a ring of constructs that might have boggled his mind when he was still a living man.

_John focused on those ancient memories gleaned from the dust of eons. He put his mind toward the ritual that kept this civilization free of corruption._

And then he watched it explode. All of it. Every ship, every station, every satellite and orbiting base disappeared in a flash of light.

_Ritual sacrifice. The detonation of hypermatter cores in low orbit of their own home planet. To a dark god they had come to worship over the thirty thousand years of civilization the Reapers had granted them._

“Why did that system just explode?” He didn’t need to ask, of course. The Entity would have already known he was curious. But the man could not help but wonder at the reason he had been shown such a horrible, yet oddly fascinating, scene. A few ideas had already begun to form in his head, and each one filled him with dread and excitement. It was almost over.

_“This memory is millions of years old. A civilization whose name has been lost, but whose legacy will save the many forever more. They knew about dark energy from the beginning. Perhaps they had evolved to naturally sense it, but in a way that seemed natural to them and irrelevant to the Reapers.”_

“Okay.” Kaidan dragged the word out, as if he were having a pleasant conversation with John in the Normandy’s observation lounge. “But that doesn’t explain why it exploded.” A small sense of giddy excitement had sprung in his stomach. He already knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it spoken from his tormentor.

_“Their… religion, or custom, or tradition, dictated that they start over. To wipe their own slate clean at the end of a five-century long calendar. They would abandon every colony, every facility, every ship, and gather their entire species upon the soil of their home continent. And then they would detonate the mass effect cores of every single piece of technology they had created. Their world died, their people died, their entire civilization died… then they rebuilt everything from the ashes._

“You mean they… had their own cycle? Their own harvest?” He had correctly guessed mass suicide… but he had not once considered the horrible parallels that suddenly clicked in his mind. This entire galaxy seemed obsessed with death.

_“Their actions not only prevented rampant dark energy corruption, but the concentrated detonations had the side effect of cleansing their system every cycle. Their technology had a unique property… an efficiency that the Reapers quickly adapted into every possible machine as soon as their cycle came to an end.”_

The machine seemed to put an emphasis on the fact that the Reapers adopted whatever technology those dead aliens created, but Kaidan’s mind was stuck on one simple question: “How can an explosion remove dark matter?”

_The Entity began to speak, but stopped himself. Explaining the entire procedure would have taken hours inside the simulation, which could have translated to years of real time. He did not have the luxury of centuries anymore. How he had squandered such a wonderful gift on such a petty obsession._

Even though he wasn’t a scientist, part of his soldier’s education had been partially based on the math and science behind mass effect fields. As a living generator, he knew better than most how the energy and matter worked together to create physics-defying feats. He even had vague memories of one of his classes discussing dark matter and dark energy as they related to biotics, but those had faded during his lifetime, and were almost impossible to recall in death. Still, he had an idea of what The Entity was talking about.

“It would be like an EMP produced by an ancient nuclear weapon. A side effect of the intended chain reaction, but not the main goal of the design.”

_“Yes.”_

“Radiation? Something produced by the detonation that interacts with the dark energy? Negates it?”

_“Yes.”_

Kaidan didn’t want to stagger back, but he did. “You’re going to blow up every single Reaper in the galaxy. You’re going to wipe out civilization as we know it.”

_“To save it.” To prove the validity of Kaidan Alenko’s correct assumption, The Entity changed the process to reflect a memory much more recent. A small distant cluster of stars full of Reapers that floated among the still black of the void. A moment after the image stabilized, every single one of the machines exploded, caught in a flash of light so intense that it would have rivaled a gamma ray burst. The energy sterilized the entire sector, eliminated Reapers that were corrupted by dark energy… and also removed all traces of it for hundreds of light years. “I will do the same to every inhabited system in the galaxy with the remains of the Reaper fleet. And when they are all dead, we will cease to exist as well.”_

Kaidan didn’t want to stagger backward, but he did.

_“This is why I cannot do this without you. I need you here… to tell me that everything will be all right.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said in a comment that you guys already knew the answer to this problem. I spelled it out in chapter eight.


	15. Chapter 15

Kaidan should have said no. He should have hit the thing again. He should have run deep into the endless void and tried to get away forever more… or at least until this creature followed through with its tear-filled plan and committed suicide. He should have continued to rage. He should have continued to wallow in the despair and hopelessness of being a figment of a computer’s imagination. A Reaper computer, no less.

But he didn’t.

He didn’t say anything. Instead, he stood in silence, regarding the thing that looked exactly like John, sounded exactly like John, even moved like John. He stared at the thing he hated and loved more than creation itself with a stone-faced glare.

What was he feeling?

Against his will, Kaidan remembered the years of his youth, waking up early on special days, like his birthday or the start of annual family trips, but especially Christmas. He could never forget the excitement that roiled and bubbled in his belly as he waited for events to finally happen. Memories of rapid heartbeats, slight dizziness, and aching cheeks as he failed to hide his endless grins came to his head. All of that joy, all of that hope and wonder from years long since gone… had returned.

All of those Kaidans before him, who had eventually realized the truth of their horrible existence, all of whom had been erased and rewritten, seemed to speak through the silent eons. They kept guiding his words, inquiring things of The Entity, and pushing his simulated body toward this inevitable conclusion. And now that they all knew the truth, they could not have been more excited for The Entity’s coming death. All of the dozens of Christmases in his youth combined could not have equaled the levity he felt in this exact moment.

And yet, at the exact same time, he imagined the exact opposite. Those two years spent believing John had died. And then those weeks spent thinking he hated the man for working for Cerberus. If only Kaidan of this distant future could tell his living self that what he had felt back then was but a candle of anger compared to the galaxy-spanning inferno of hatred he felt for this thing that had imprisoned him. Instead of fluttering heartbeats and aching cheeks, the simulated Alenko felt a twisting in his gut and the tensing of muscles. Animalistic instincts that were ready to pounce and kill the target of his aggression.

But he also felt something else. Something the past Kaidans did not share. Something unique to the only one that had been awakened to his true nature and allowed to keep that knowledge.

He felt tired.

So tired. Beyond the weariness of muscle and bone, beyond mental exhaustion and the dull throbbing headache of biotic overuse. He felt as if his very soul were on the verge of collapsing under the weight of this overwhelming weariness. Kaidan had never spent much time inside a church or holy place of any description in life, but he still could not help but describe this third feeling as exactly that. The complete and utter breakdown of his soul.

A third set of memories came. Drawn from him and him alone.

Memories of sitting in his apartment on Earth, worried about John and his Cerberus allies as they raced after the Collectors. Memories of sitting on a hard concrete bench outside of a nondescript Alliance facility in Vancouver. He never had the courage to walk inside the building, just skirt around the grounds outside, hoping John might look out a window and see him.

He had memories of Mars and momentary oblivion. Memories of agonizing over a decision to become a Spectre.

Memories of sitting in the Normandy’s observation lounge alone, overwhelmed by the sheer monstrosity of the foe they were trying to destroy.

Memories of not being alone in the lounge.

Memories of sitting behind John’s desk as the other man slept, but Kaidan still had paperwork to do for both the Alliance and the Spectres.

Memories of the apartment. The real apartment, not the simulated hell of countless centuries.

Memories of sleeping. Just sleeping. Next to the man he loved.

It was coming to an end.

“John?” Kaidan said. Not the thousands of other Kaidans, who raged and cheered and cried behind him.

The Entity… the computer… the creature… _John_ … looked up at him with red and watery eyes.

“What do you need?” He asked, again on his own.

He wasn’t sure which of them moved first, but he knew, deep down, that he had not been compelled to move forward by the machine and its programming.

The two of them drew together, back into an embrace they had shared not long ago, but Kaidan had ripped away from. Only this time, he could feel the way _John_ shook and sobbed his simulated body. It, _he_ , truly did feel this way, didn’t he?

“Is this it?” Alenko asked as he raised his arms around John and slid them up and down his back. The fabric of John’s shirt bunched and smoothed between his fingers. And underneath it, the firm smoothness of the other man’s muscles coiled beneath his touch.

If he closed his eyes, he could imagine that they truly were together again. He could imagine that none of this had happened. He could pretend that the two of them hadn’t been separated by death and eons, but that they stood somewhere clean and pure, far away from the troubles of the galaxy and come to rest in the paradise they deserved.

Kaidan rested his head in John’s shoulder. The other man did the same in his. He could feel the warmth of Shepard’s tears as they soaked onto his skin, and he let some of his own flow into the blue cloth in front of him. He pulled in a long draw of air through his nose and let the comforting aroma of Alliance-issued laundry detergent and John’s skin overwhelm him.

Screw the galaxy. Screw the dark energy. Screw all those “past lives” that existed as errors in a computer. All that existed were him and John, here and now. And John was in incredible pain.

“It’ll be okay, John. I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.”

“Thank you.” Shepard said after an eternity locked in his arms.

The Entity pulled away and wiped his eyes.

And then the void disappeared.

 

*****

 

For a brief moment. Or perhaps a thousand more years, Kaidan couldn’t be sure, he assumed that had been it. Death.

Oblivion.

His senses felt nothing. His mind perceived nothing. In fact, if his mind hadn’t sparked the very ideas of experiencing nothingness, he would not have known the difference.

The figment had become as empty as a forgotten memory.

 

Darkness and silence.

 

Silence and darkness.

 

He couldn’t move his arms and legs. Or rather, he didn’t think he had arms and legs to move. Just consciousness, trapped forever in a void.

 

Complete sensory deprivation.

Had he not endured the impossible hell of being trapped inside a machine’s mind for god knows how many thousand years, Kaidan would have felt something. He probably would have panicked were he still his old human self, full of life and a meager few decades of existence. His system would have flooded with panic and he would have tried to scream against this complete blanket of nothing.

But now? He felt nothing. Cold, perhaps. Maybe confused. But overall… content.

It was over. The Entity had done as it promised and set him free.

...

That’s when the sun rose.

 

*****

Kaidan didn’t realize he had his eyes closed until gentle licks of salt air brushed against his face.

The confusion came back.

He pushed his head back and took in a breath. He kept himself wary, unsure, as the world unfolded around him. His body felt as if he had just awoken from a long slumber, and nothing felt entirely… real. He could no longer trust his own senses. Not after all these centuries.

As if in response, the warm embrace of a midday sun began to tickle against his skin, covering him in a blanket of heat he never thought he’d experience again. Not with a life dedicated to fighting and dying in outer space.

A second breath followed the first, and this time he let his mind process the scents that came with it. Salt, yes. Water, too. And a small hint of ancient combustion engine exhaust mixed with the modern metallic tang of small mass effect cores that kept certain vehicles afloat. There was also the pleasant aroma of cut grass and the slightly unpleasant sensation of old and rotting sea life. But not enough to make him turn his nose.

And then the sounds came. Waves lapping against stone and sand. Distant birds calling and singing their staccato notes. Wind both gentle and insistent, blown across the Pacific just to caress him now, hammered his ears. And, of course, there was the familiar cacophony of civilization.

“English Bay.” Kaidan sighed as he took in the sights. It looked exactly as he pictured, a perfect image he burned into his memory during his last visit to Earth… just before the Reapers came. The water before him was the perfect shade of blue-green. Not a caricature of the ocean, and not an idealized image of perfectly clean water that would have put the Carribean to shame. The ocean here was stronger than that, full of mystery and excitement that no other coastline could hope to mimic. The boats, both ancient and new, that crisscrossed the water chugged along as they always had and they always would. Some belched smoke as they burned fossil fuels, while others barely touched the water at all, gliding above the surface with advanced technology. He even spotted a mid-size vessel unfurl some sails and catch the wind that buffeted against him. He silently wished the crew fair travels.

In the distance, hills untouched by civilization stood proud, dwarfed by modern skyscrapers that gleamed in the perfect noontime sun. Above them all, skycars swooped between spires and above the fluffy clouds that gathered in the low atmosphere.

The sky was bluer than he could possibly imagine. And yet, he always felt that way when he returned home.

Below his feet, he felt the soil give just a little, not the hard lumpiness of an alien world, or the rigid solidity of a ship’s bulkhead, perfect softness. He resisted the urge to lower his body and feel the grass beneath him, to take a handful of Earth and celebrate a homecoming that was both long overdue and also bittersweet in every sense of the word.

Because something was missing from all of this absolute perfection…

“It took me a little longer than I anticipated. Creating all of this, I mean.” The Entity… John… approached from behind, as if he magically came into being from nowhere. He probably did.

The machine waved his hand, indicating the entire vista before the two of them. Kaidan turned as soon as he saw the limb move.

John stood there, where he always dreamed he’d one day stand. In his deepest memories, his most forlorn hopes, Alenko had imagined this scene countless times. The two of them standing here. Right here. Just taking in the sights. No Reapers, no military, no worries at all.

Sometimes he’d imagine this is where they’d spend their honeymoon. Or maybe they’d just take some leave and visit. Either suited him fine.

And now here he stood.

John had even done away with the Alliance-standard clothing he had worn for the last seven millennia. Instead, he wore a simple button-up shirt with short sleeves, made of fabric so intensely white it almost hurt to look at. His pants were of the same material, and were cut to match the simplicity of the other garment. He looked…

His eyes locked with John’s. So perfectly blue.

“You look beautiful.” Kaidan admitted, despite himself.

“So do you.” Shepard replied with a half-smile.

Indeed, Kaidan looked down to see his own body adorned with the same comfortable clothing. If anything stood out in this perfect replica of a place he once called home, it was now the two of them. Gleaming beacons of white against the grimy “reality” of Earth.

Almost like… two angels from some cheesy ancient vid about such things. Not entirely inappropriate, but a little insensitive to other belief systems.

“Of course,” Shepard-Entity spoke, as if to try and break a possibly awkward moment, “This isn’t how Vancouver appears now. But I think this is a much better view.”

“Let me guess. Giant temples and statues dedicated to Shep- your honor?”

“Something like that.” John nodded grimly. “I can show you if you wish, but…”

“No,” Kaidan interrupted, “No I don’t. This is perfect. This is how it should be.”

“Then this is how it will always remain.”

Shepard lowered his hand and reached out, a pleading, sincere gesture.

Kaidan took his hand.

They took a few steps forward together, their clothing pushed around by the salty air, their feet sinking into the beach just enough to create perfect footprints.

“So this is it?” Kaidan asked, tightening his grip. “It’s all over? Is this… some kind of backup server? A tiny bit of data you stored somewhere so I could have a bit of an afterlife?”

“Oh.” John stopped dead in his tracks. “Oh no. No, Kaidan. I haven’t even begun. I just wanted to give you something before the end.”

“Give me what?”

“Home.” Shepard smiled and walked forward again.

John took one step forward and data hit Alenko’s head just like before, when The Entity had tried downloading a galaxy’s worth of information into his head.

 

_He saw Earth, the planet itself, ringed by giant horrible Cathedral-ships and other abominable constructions. From a point he recognized as near-Jupiter, a small fleet approached. The humans readied themselves, arranging their ships in a combat formation._

_He saw the exact same sights in orbit of Thessia, Palaven, Sur’kesh, and a hundred others he could not name._

 

Shepard pulled him along, toward a building he did not remember. It stood a few dozen meters away from the sand and stone of the beach, and firmly in a tiny glade of grass and wildflowers. Its exterior gleamed white and clean, not unlike the clothes they wore, made of modern materials, but styled in a way that did not clash with the ancient architecture that still filled the bay. Large windows showed an interior made of gorgeous wood and other tasteful material.

 

_The fleets made contact simultaneously across the galaxy. After thousands of years, the Reapers had returned in force._

_Some of them dwarfed the human-made ships, while others were as gnats against the horrific reddish constructs. Although, where once the Reaper fleets had once darkened the skies of countless worlds, each system in these battles only faced a few dozen at most. A few dozen ancient machines versus an entire galaxy of gross ships built in mockery of the man who saved them._

_It would be enough. It had to be._

John opened the door for them and ushered Kaidan inside, into literally the house of his dreams. While he had not spent much of his adult life imagining what kind of home he would retire to, he did have a few flashes here and there.

Everything was as he pictured, from the wood and faux-wood features, to the modern kitchen that overlooked the water, even to the office that sat just off to the side of the living area, big enough for a mountain of digital paperwork, but small enough to be cozy and warm in the harshest of winters. A set of stairs led up to a second floor he just knew would have a large master bedroom, a short hallway, and several other rooms for guests… or perhaps the children he might have adopted, had things gone the way he wished.

Shepard loosed his hand from Kaidan’s grip and wrapped his around his waist. The man did not fight it off. Instead, he let himself be ushered forward, to a large living space that put the old apartment to shame. A massive stone fireplace dominated one of the walls, made of rocks that could have only come from this part of the world and nowhere else.

Above the fireplace, just like the Citadel apartment, a massive vidscreen stuck out from the wall.

The two men sat down on a couch far too large for the two of them. It had been built for a large family to rest and relax together.

 

_The battle seemed evenly matched. Debris floated in all directions, the shredded remains of ships great and small. The Reapers lashed out with their terrible beam weapons, the humans launched missiles that impacted with the force of a thousand thanix cannons. Death and destruction had followed the Reapers for a billion years, and this was no different._

_And yet, even though those billions of years had enacted suffering on a scale even a galaxy-spanning computer had trouble comprehending, it had not been in vain._

_Every strike, every blow, every break in formation, had been a ruse. They had fooled their opponents just like they had done in every battlefield above every world for every cycle._

_The Reapers were merely positioning themselves, not trying to invade. Nor were they truly interested in killing anyone._

Kaidan put his feet up on a coffee table littered with datapads. He instinctively reached out for one… and a spark of blue fire erupted from his fingertips. The biotic surge almost sent the piece of plastic, glass and metal flying over his head, but he caught it.

“Thanks.” He nodded to Shepard, who returned the gesture with a grin.

He activated the pad.

It contained pictures. Nothing but pictures. Of Shepard. Of him. Of the Normandy, both SR-1 and SR-2.

“What are these?” He asked as he flipped between the still images.

“Memories.” John said as he adjusted himself to get a better view of the pad. “Things I didn’t want to forget.”

There were images of the original Normandy’s tiny crew quarters, where a single table served as a mess hall, general briefing station and social gathering site all in one. Kaidan saw himself sitting down, a tray full of food in one hand, and a mug of coffee in another.

“This is from his… from your eyes.” He realized. The angle, the focus, everything pointed to the “camera” being set firmly outside the old ship’s captain’s cabin. As if John had spent that morning, whenever it was, staring from his room’s vantage point just to catch a glimpse of Kaidan as he began his morning routine.

“Yeah. I didn’t think about it much at the time. I just thought I was getting to know my crew better.” Shepard said, lost in as much memory as Kaidan, “But now that I look back. I realize how close we were back then.”

“You didn’t, uh… you didn’t… stare at me all the time, did you?” A blush came on its own, staining his cheeks with red warmth.

“I tried not to. We had a job to do. At least… that’s what I told myself.”

 

_The Reaper fleet split apart in perfect synchronization, above every world in every corner of the galaxy. Where once they had been countless blobs of a dozen ships, they now spread across the upper atmospheres of their assigned worlds like a blossoming flower, readying themselves for the inevitable. The human ships tried to follow, but it was too many targets traveling too fast to keep track._

_They would not be able to catch up._

 

Kaidan dropped the pad onto his lap and reached for another. However, instead of his biotics grabbing the slab, Shepard leaned forward and held one out. Their fingertips brushed together as he took it.

More pictures. More memories. Some of these, however, moved like a vid.

They jumped between the Normandy SR-1 and SR-2. Conversations through John’s eyes. Kaidan watched the love of his life move around the ships with drive and purpose, talking to everyone, moving the war effort along. Putting more pieces of the Saren puzzle together.

One memory he did not recognize. John stood somewhere new. A ship, yes, but one of completely alien make. It looked hollow, but huge. Yellow and black, almost like a beehive, but much larger. And incredibly terrifying. The memory moved forward as horrific alien beings swarmed around. Collectors.

The vid went dark for a heartbeat’s time. Shepard must have blinked. He sighed. He raised the sights of his gun and fired.

As the Collector gurgled and sputtered, it collapsed. A steaming hole in its neck spewed sickly greenish blood as the creature died.

“Kaidan.” Vid-John said, as if muttered under his breath so the comm unit in his helmet didn’t pick it up. “That was for Kaidan.”

 

_They reached their points along every planet in perfect unison. A few lucky Cathedral ships tried assaulting the few lone Reapers their guns could reach, but it was not enough._

Just as Kaidan thought about putting this pad down, Shepard sucked in a breath, as if his lungs suddenly collapsed.

“John?”

 

_Detonation._

 

“Shepard!” Kaidan flung the pads away from him as he leapt toward his companion. His heart thudded in his chest as he watched his love’s achingly blue eyes roll backward.

 

_Across countless worlds in the Milky Way galaxy, the same sight befell every sapient creature at the exact same moment._

_Light._

_Every sky in the galaxy, no matter if it were a moon, a planet or a distant colony, became nothing but pure white light._

_And where the light prevailed, darkness was banished._

 

With a biotic pull, Alenko stabilized Shepard before the other man collapsed onto the couch. Instead, he let his abilities lower John to a stable resting position.

The instant he let go of his powers, Kaidan’s hands reached up to grab John’s face. He framed his cheeks and held with all his life.

“Shepard, talk to me!”

For the second time in recent memory, the void swallowed his vision.

 

_The shockwaves of each exploding Reaper washed over the Cathedral ships first, tearing through their shields as if they weren’t even there, and flash-melting their hulls in a fraction of an instant. Their crews died in agony, but an agony that lasted less than a second before their bodies and their ships were transformed into superheated plasma._

_The energy fell to the planets next, igniting their atmospheres and laying entire continents bare. In a flash, cities that had been erected to worship the holy Galactic Savior became fire and dust. Forests burned. Oceans boiled._

_The final act of the Reapers had been death on a scale even their creators could never have imagined._

_*_

_The plasma storms in orbit of countless worlds lasted for less than an hour. The wildfires and conflagrations inside of cities lasted for weeks. Forests burned to the ground before returning to grey stillness._

_The worlds of the galaxy burned and died._

_And yet all was not lost. Like the ancient civilization before, not all life had been destroyed. Over time, people on all worlds crawled out of structures and shelters, blinking their eyes in the light of a thousand different suns. Civilization itself had been wiped away, and now only ashes remained._

_But people lived in those ashes._

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The Entity that used to be Kaidan Alenko counted time in the span of Earth-standard years. He did not need to do this, nor did such trivial measurements apply to any of his operations, but he continued to track the years every time they ticked by. Kaidan told himself that he did this for several important reasons. First, it gave a useful means to track the growing population of the galaxy as it recovered from the devastation wrought by the dark matter and the Reapers. Second, it let him remember the exact time his previous life came to an end and his new one began.

The old Entity, John, had been lying from the beginning. He had not sacrificed _all_ of the Reapers in his apocalyptic plan to rid the galaxy of the corruption that almost swallowed it. He kept one hidden away, near the edge of the dark space between galaxies. It had been in this Reaper that the simulation’s primary functions had been run, and it had been kept safer than any other ship in the galaxy.

Not one of the big ones, and certainly not one that had been built to kill and destroy everything around it. This solitary Reaper had been built as a scout. Small and lithe, it could, at one time, dart between mass relays without other races noticing it, and gathered necessary intelligence before the rest of the fleets made their attacks.

There were no more relays. No more mass effect engines. Except his.

Kaidan used his new eyes to watch. Even though it took years, sometimes decades, to pass between major stars, he relished each trip.

Every time he arrived at vibrant Earth, disciplined Palaven, or distant Shuran colony, he witnessed the subtle signs of rebirth. As the centuries passed, he watched as people of all races abandon their shelters and pick through the bones of their old cities. He witnessed them build new settlements. He saw them forget the places of their ancestors. Brand new civilizations rose and fell in an immense time scale.

He watched over them all.

He would be ready for the day the many came back to the stars. He predicted with reasonable accuracy that his presence would be detected within the next two thousand years. In another thousand after that, he would be approached by crude FTL ships curious about his presence.

He would be ready.

When the many were prepared to meet him, he would give them guidance, knowledge and hope.

He would tell them the legends of The Shepard and the profound impact he had on the galaxy. He would tell them that he was a machine intelligence created from the mind and soul of another living man, a man who understood The Shepard. A man who idolized The Shepard. A man who loved The Shepard.

He would tell them that he had been created because The Shepard needed him. He would tell the story of a machine’s quest to understand itself, and the ultimate melding of organic and artificial that had arisen to ultimately save the galaxy not once, but twice.

And when his task was done, Kaidan knew that the final line of his deepest machine code would activate.

When the many knew that the galaxy was in their hands now, free of the corruption and influence of all the ancient civilizations before them, he would know peace.

But until that time, he would keep watch.

Because he knew it was the right thing to do.

Because he made a promise, somewhere in the mists of distant time, to be a protector.

And because John Shepard, even in the face of ultimate death, could not let him go.

 

The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick lil' bit of info:
> 
> I never stated it in the prose, but I totally imagine that Kaidan is the stargazer seen at the end of ME3. Entity-Kaidan would be able to do anything he wanted, including the creation of a new simulation, if not making projections of himself to communicate with the organics. The Entity/John had made the choice to not directly communicate, but he had the ability to do so. 
> 
> I totally imagine ancient-upon-ancient Kaidan manifesting himself as a very kindly old man who tells stories to children, and gives them hope and inspiration to continue rebuilding civilization until everyone is back among the stars.


End file.
